Last-Minute Marriage

by Marisa Carroll

  “Oh, no. I couldn’t possibly.” She didn’t want to be seen eating with Mitch Sterling. She was almost certain there was enough gossip about his impetuous hire swirling around Riverbend as it was.

  “Sure you can. I’m buying,” Maggie insisted.

  “There’s no use arguing with Aunt Maggie, Tessa.”

  “The special today is pot roast and apple pie. I called the restaurant and asked before I left the farm.”

  “The Sunnyside serves the best pot roast in the county,” Mitch told her. “How can you turn that down?”

  “I can’t,” Tessa said, giving in because she was hungry and almost as starved for company as for food. “I’d be happy to join you for lunch.”

  THE SMELL OF POT ROAST and gravy hit Mitch with almost tangible force as he held open the door of the café so that Maggie and Tessa could enter first. His stomach growled so loudly he was afraid the two women would hear it. He’d missed breakfast because Sam had been playing a video game until the last possible minute and then couldn’t find his homework paper. Belle had treed a squirrel, or so she thought, and had to be dragged back into the house and put in the basement because she was covered with mud.

  Caleb had been cranky and short-tempered over the muddy paw prints on the kitchen floor, and by the time Mitch had deposited Sam at school, he’d been ten minutes late opening the store. Two pickup trucks with their impatient drivers had been waiting in the parking lot when he got there. All in all it was one of those days that Mitch wished he’d joined the French Foreign Legion right out of high school.

  But letting his curious aunt Maggie maneuver Tessa into having lunch with them might be the beginning of an upturn in the day. Tessa had kept to herself all week. She seldom left the boathouse when she wasn’t working, and he suspected she was catching up on her sleep. The fatigue lines that had bracketed her mouth and eyes had disappeared. She looked a little less haunted, too. The shadows that darkened those blue eyes from cornflower to twilight were fading.

  Mitch had kept his distance. She was as wary as a doe in hunting season, and he didn’t want to scare her off. But deep down inside, he had to admit he was hoping he could find a way to keep her in Riverbend.

  Having lunch with Aunt Maggie as chaperon wasn’t the ideal first step, but it was the best shot he was going to get.

  “Mitch, got a booth empty over here,” Lucy Garvey called from across the crowded room. Mitch headed in that direction, acknowledging a friendly wave from Evie Mazerik, Aaron’s mother, perched on a stool at her usual spot behind the cash register.

  “What can I get for you?” the waitress asked after they’d seated themselves, Tessa and Maggie on one side of the high-backed booth, Mitch on the other. Tessa hadn’t made a fuss about sitting in the booth, the way Kara used to when she was pregnant. She maneuvered her way carefully across the seat, being careful not to bump her rounded belly on the table, and smiled as Maggie thumped down beside her.

  “Still have a couple of orders of the special left, if you want some, but you’ll have to make up your mind right away—I can’t guarantee how long it will last,” Lucy informed them, order pad at the ready. Lucy was the sister of his best friend, Charlie Callahan, and Mitch had known her all his life.

  “Sounds good to me,” Mitch said. “Aunt Maggie, what about you?”

  “I’ll have the special, too. And don’t be stingy with the gravy.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “And you, ma’am?” Lucy’s voice was suddenly more formal. It was her waitress voice, reserved for the few tourists and out-of-towners who found their way to the Sunnyside.

  “I’ll have a salad, please. French dressing on the side. And a big glass of milk.”

  “You can bring her the milk,” Maggie said imperiously, “and the salad, too, if she wants it. But add another special to the order.”

  “No, really—”

  Maggie Leatherman hadn’t taken no for an answer for as long as Mitch could remember. She wasn’t about to start now. “You’re eating for two. And you look as if it’s been a while since you had a good meal. I’d cook you one myself, but after forty-nine years of cooking for Will and my boys, I’m retired from the kitchen, unless the spirit moves me.”

  Tessa looked at Mitch, a little frown line between her eyebrows. He shrugged and tried to put her at ease. Maggie was even nosier than his granddad when she put her mind to it, but she didn’t have a mean bone in her body. “Aunt Maggie’s been bossing people around since she was a sergeant in the WACs in World War II. Just sit back and enjoy the meal.”

  “Longer than that. I helped raise six brothers and sisters. All younger than me. All still living, thank the Lord.”

  “Okay.” Tessa spread her hands in surrender and gave Mitch that little half smile that sent a thrill of electricity along his nerve ends, as if he’d touched a bare wire. She looked up at Lucy and smiled a little more broadly. “So I guess I’m going to have the special, too.”

  “It comes with dessert. Apple pie. A la mode is fifty cents extra.”

  “We want the works,” Maggie responded.

  “You got it.” Lucy hurried off to take orders at another table.

  “Now we can talk.” Maggie settled back against the cushion. “I haven’t seen you since Will and the boys started taking off beans, Mitch. Seems I do nothing but haul soybeans to the elevator these days. How’s business?”

  “Can’t complain, Aunt Maggie,” Mitch said, giving the ritual response as he stirred cream into the cup of coffee Lucy had poured. In a small town it didn’t pay to brag too much in front of customers, just as it wasn’t good form to complain when times weren’t so good. “Got the plans for the new greenhouse from the contractor yesterday. It’s going to be a real beauty.”

  “A new greenhouse?” Maggie repeated. “Your granddad hasn’t said anything about it.” She sipped on the diet cola Lucy placed in front of her, along with Tessa’s glass of milk and a basket of dinner rolls and a jar of strawberry jam.

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “He’s doing it just to get more of my hard-earned tip money. As if I don’t spend enough at your place buying plants for my garden as it is.”

  The greenhouse was a Victorian design, glass and cedar. It would be a showplace on the east side of the building. He’d seen one like it at a hardware show last year in Chicago. Their spring and summer vegetable and bedding-plant business had outgrown the plastic and metal greenhouses they’d used in the past. The only landscaper in town had retired two years before, and that was a niche they could fill, too. Caleb hadn’t been too keen on the idea at first, but he’d come around once he’d seen the plans and the estimated increase in revenue.

  “I want to get it framed and under roof before the weather turns bad. Then the guys can work on the inside when it gets slow this winter.” Tessa had been tearing her dinner roll into pieces while he talked. She stopped and raised her eyes to his. Her expression was assessing and easy to read. When the weather got bad and business slowed down at Home-Mart, they just laid people off. But that wasn’t the Sterling way. It wasn’t the Riverbend way. Here you kept employees on the payroll regardless.

  Mitch stopped talking. What made him think Tessa was interested in his long-term plans for the business, or his life? She’d made it clear she wasn’t going to be in town more than a few weeks. Her future didn’t include a man with a hearing-impaired son and cantankerous grandfather, a guy who planted pumpkins among the marigolds in front of his business to give away to kids at Halloween and who worked at the concession stand for high-school football games.

  The silence stretched out for a moment or two before Maggie turned to Tessa with a new subject. “Mitch’s father was my godson. Celia, Mitch’s grandmother, always wanted a big family, but she and Caleb were only blessed with Dale. And Dale and his wife, Charlotte, God rest their souls, they only had Mitch here. Not like me and Will. We raised five boys,” she said with pride. “And eleven grandchildren.”

  “How wonderful for you,” Tessa sai
d, her smile making the words more than just polite.

  “They’re a trial sometimes. But I love them all. Mitch’s grandmother and I were best friends from the time we were five and went to the one-room school together.”

  “A one-room school?”

  Lucy returned and set three plates of steaming pot roast and gravy before them. Maggie answered Tessa’s question as they busied themselves with napkins and salt and pepper shakers. “Each section hereabouts had their own one-room school in those days. We rode one of the plow horses when the weather was bad and walked when it was good. Later my dad got me an old Model-A Ford when I was old enough to go to high school here in town. You didn’t need to be sixteen to get a license in those days if you lived on a farm. And girls learned to drive just like boys. What good times we had!”

  Maggie was looking off into the distance, remembering times and places that were well-worn memories years before Mitch was even born. She looked a little sad, and he knew it was because she still missed her girlhood friend, though his grandmother had been in her grave these ten years past.

  “I’d love to hear all about your days growing up on a farm and your service during the war,” Tessa said, her fork poised over a roasted potato swimming in rich beef gravy.

  “Someday when the farming’s done, I’ll come into town and we’ll have lunch and I’ll tell you all about it,” Maggie promised. “Why, I’ve got as many stories as Laura Ingalls Wilder. Wish someone would make a TV show out of them and make me a bushel of money.” She laughed. “That’s not likely to happen, so I guess I’ll keep on doing a little day trading in cattle futures. Who knows? I might strike it rich like the president’s wife, and me and Will can retire to Florida and bake our old bones in the sun. Now, let’s eat before the food gets cold.”

  “THANK YOU for keeping Maggie from asking me about…things,” Tessa said as she and Mitch crossed the parking lot to the store. They’d dropped the “genuine antique person” off at the grain elevator. Tessa had marveled at the old lady’s agility and expertise as she fired up the huge green tractor and drove out onto the street, pulling a tandem of empty grain wagons behind her, promising to pick up her paint when she came through with the next load later in the afternoon.

  “It’s just a reprieve, you know,” Mitch warned Tessa as they approached the hardware store. If Aunt Maggie’s determined to find out your life history, she’ll do it.” The parking lot was half-full. Caleb and Bill Webber were probably knee-deep in customers, but Mitch lingered outside with Tessa, enjoying the slight warmth of the October sun.

  “I have a feeling the same could be said about Ruth and Rachel Steele.”

  He fixed his steady brown eyes on Tessa. “Riverbend is a small place. You’re a stranger. And fair game for some. Not Ruth and Rachel, or Aunt Maggie, no matter how nosy she comes across. But there are others a lot less charitable and goodhearted and just as curious. Don’t let yourself think for a moment there aren’t.”

  Over the past few days she’d become increasingly convinced that Riverbend was the kind of idyllic small town she’d been searching for in her heart. Mitch must have read that longing in her eyes or her voice. She hadn’t thought she was so transparent, but apparently to this man she was.

  A tractor and wagons rumbled by on the way to the elevator down the street. The dry earthy scent of the grain they carried wafted by on the breeze. Mitch stopped walking as they reached the shadow of the hardware store. From around back she could hear the insistent beep, beep, beep of a tow motor as it backed up with a load of lumber.

  “I don’t want to see you hurt, Tessa.” He was warning her off, perhaps from more than the hurt that small-town gossips could inflict. Unlike Brian, unlike the men her mother had unwisely fallen for, Mitch was an honorable man. A small-town knight in shining armor, riding to her rescue in the front seat of a police cruiser.

  But rescued damsels in distress sometimes fell in love with their knights.

  In fairy tales. Not in real life.

  And this knight in shining armor had enough problems of his own, without taking on hers.

  God, I haven’t let him see I have feelings for him, have I? she thought in sudden panic. No. She wasn’t guilty of that because she hadn’t let herself think about Mitch Sterling as anything but a boss since the morning she’d set foot in the store. It was a promise she’d try very hard not to break, for her baby’s sake, as much as her own.

  She felt the baby move inside her, almost as though she, too, could hear the sound of Mitch’s low deep voice. “Don’t worry. I won’t be staying around long enough to get hurt.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  TESSA HAD DECIDED to teach herself to knit. She’d never held a pair of knitting needles in her life, but holding Maggie Leatherman’s baby sweater in her hands that day at the hardware store had triggered a longing inside her. A longing to create something to welcome her baby into the world.

  The vague desire had coalesced into purpose when she’d come across the Stitch in Time Shoppe, around the corner from Killian’s department store. Most of the interior of the long narrow shop was taken up with needlepoint kits and row upon row of fabrics in prints and solids. Beautiful quilts hung from the walls and could be seen in various stages of completion in frames at the back of the store. But as interesting as the combinations of color and pattern were to Tessa, it was the honeycomb of shelves along the far wall that drew her. They were filled with skein after skein of knitting yarn. All the colors of the earth and sky, pastels and primaries, thick and thin, soft and heavy. And toward the end of the display a section of pinks and blues, pale greens and downy duck yellows.

  Yarn for baby things. It beckoned her to hold it in her hands and fashion it into something soft and warm for her baby.

  The fantasy brought a smile to her lips and her heart.

  The reality brought a frown and an urge to throw everything into the river.

  “Knit three, purl two.” She sat on the worn leather sofa, her feet drawn up under her, and practiced the stitches the apple-cheeked lady who ran the shop had taught her.

  “You don’t want to tackle anything too hard for your first project,” she’d explained. “Here’s a nice little sweater, no set-in sleeves, no buttonholes to work. Believe me, there’s nothing more discouraging than taking on a project that’s beyond your skill level. It just plain turns you off.”

  So Tessa had bought the yarn and needles, the pattern book and stitch markers, and she’d spent the whole first evening casting on stitches. The next day she’d gone back for another lesson, then come home to knit row after row. She was getting pretty good at that. Purling was okay, but not as much fun as knitting. Now she had to put the stitches all together and come up with a sweater.

  She pulled her lip between her teeth and concentrated on getting the lower edge, the ribbing, just so. No stitch too loose. No stitch too tight. And, heaven help her, none dropped at the end of the row.

  The boathouse didn’t have a TV, so she was already becoming familiar with the programming on the local radio station. In the evening WRBN played a mixture of classic rock and pop country tunes—if there wasn’t a sporting event being broadcast from one county venue or another. And that was a big if. All the area teams got their chance to be on the radio. And all the area merchants bought commercial time.

  It had surprised Tessa at first when she’d heard Mitch’s voice telling listeners they could shop at Sterling Hardware and Building Supply with satisfaction, and be confident that they would get the best value for their dollar that he could provide. After all, his family had been doing business in the same location for more than seventy years. He sounded relaxed and at ease, as though he were talking to you over the counter at the hardware and not in a studio on the second floor of the Steele Building on Main Street.

  No gags, no gimmicks. A message as straightforward as the man himself.

  Tessa was fast coming to realize that she could learn just about anything she wanted to know about life in Riverbend
if she listened to WRBN.

  The announcers were more like the town criers of old than disc jockeys. Not only did they read advertising copy and give weather updates, they read the obituaries every morning at eight-twenty-five, the humane shelter report at nine-fifteen—listing the lost and found and adoptable animals—followed by the lunch menu at the seniors’ center. And at ten o’clock the so-called “stork report.” The circle of life in a small town. Old folks dying and new citizens making their appearance at the Riverbend Community Health Center. Even out-of-town births, phoned into the station by proud grandparents, were announced.

  No one would care enough about her baby being born to make such an effort.

  “We’re all alone in this big world, little one,” she whispered.

  The slow sad music on the radio and the sound of rain dripping from the eaves had turned her mood melancholy. Tessa let her knitting rest in her lap and stared out into the darkness beyond the window. Every day that passed made her more and more reluctant to leave. She wasn’t looking forward to her baby being born in a big impersonal hospital in a city where she knew no one but her sister, instead of in Riverbend, where she at least knew that one of the doctors was Mitch’s friend, and the mayor’s daughter was a nurse.

  A silly way to feel, since she hadn’t actually met those women, but it made no difference to her heart. No difference at all.

  A scratching at the door was followed by a short sharp bark and a snuffling whine. It was Belle, Sam’s dog, begging to be let inside. It wasn’t the first time Belle had come visiting. But it was the first time Tessa was tempted to let her in.

  “Hey, doggy, did you slip your leash?” she asked, opening the door. The night smelled of rain and smoke from Mitch’s fireplace, and wet dog. Tessa wrinkled her nose, reconsidering her invitation. She’d opened the door only a crack, but it was enough for the big yellow dog to get her head through. And once Belle had her head through, the rest of her soon followed.

  “Uh-oh,” Tessa said, taking a step back, a little startled at the Lab’s strength and determination. “I bet you’re not supposed to be in here, right?”