SEALed with a Ring

by Mary Margret Daughtridge

  He was so out of his element and yet so touchingly eager to get it right that JJ took pity on him. "I'll get them," she told him.

  As far as she knew, while there were luncheon forks and dinner forks, there was no such thing as a breakfast fork. She selected medium-sized forks with more slender tines than salad forks, but shorter and lighter than dinner forks. No reason they couldn't be "breakfast" forks—if she said they were.

  On impulse, she rejected the Chantilly (official pat tern of Air Force One—Grandmother had loved knowing that!) as too classical in mood. Instead, since this break fast seemed to be in the spirit of her grandmother, she put back the ones she'd chosen and found the Audubon pattern by Tiffany.

  It was a set her grandmother had bought for herself. The restrained bird and leaf design evoked, as nothing else could, her love of nature, art, and elegance. JJ gath ered knives and spoons as well.

  JJ had never seen Lucas in quite this mood. He seemed to feel some extraordinary hospitality was called for, and there was something touching about his fumbling efforts. He knew what a well-laid table should look like, but he had no idea how to assemble one. Since she knew he wouldn't think of them, she asked him, "Would you like for me to bring the coffee cups that go with the 'breakfast' china?"

  When she returned with them to the kitchen, her grandfather took a fork and hefted it. "These are the breakfast forks? Huh." He shook his head. "She saw them some place on our honeymoon. Loved them on sight. I should have bought them for her then, but I told her we had no need to be spending money that way. Her mother and mine had housefuls of silver that would come to us, and God knows how much more we'd got ten for wedding presents."

  "Did you refuse because you didn't have the money?" David asked, spooning eggs onto the plates.

  "Well, our parents didn't support us. We only had what I made working at the car place. But the car busi ness was incredible in the sixties and seventies. Into the eighties. Making money hand over fist."

  "Besides that," JJ reminded him, "Grandmother was the only heir to the Jessup half of the Caruthers and Jessup partnership. You and your father saved a bundle by creating a marriage merger rather than having to buy her father out when he wanted to retire."

  Nobody ever said her grandparent's marriage had been dynastically motivated. Still it had guaranteed Lucas's father would leave his share of the business to him rather than his brothers—and everybody in Wilmington knew it.

  "We've been through several name changes," she explained to David, "but the business was actually started in 1907 by my something-great-grandfather George Jessup."

  "It was George Jessup and Sons," Lucas added, "until the thirties when my father bought in and the name changed to Caruthers and Jessup."

  "So your grandmother was a Jessup, and that's why you're named Jane Jessup?" David asked when they were all seated, plates piled with fluffy golden eggs, crisp bacon, hash browns, and muffins David had found in the fridge and reheated in the oven. He had been lis tening and drawing conclusions.

  JJ nodded. "And now the business is Caruthers. I once suggested it should be changed to Caruthers and Caruthers." That was back when she had considered herself an owner, rather than an employee. "But since then I've changed my name. It looks like a Caruthers and Caruthers will never happen."

  JJ didn't like the tinge of bitterness that crept into her voice. She went back to the original subject. "I never knew Grandmother asked you for the silver."

  Her grandfather's gaze roamed over a past only he could see and then returned to her. "I don't know that she did ask, directly. I knew she wanted it. She didn't say anything else, and I forgot all about it." He turned to Dave. "Listen to me." He lifted a spoon and pointed it at the younger man. "If you want to be a happy man, make agreeing with your wife your first priority. Women never forget." The corners of his mouth turned down. "She never used these after she got them."

  JJ stared at him in surprise. "Yes, she did."

  Granddaddy's hooded green eyes lit with a heated mixture of doubt and hope. "When?"

  JJ thought back. "Let me see, she always used the Audubon when her garden club met here, even if it was just a committee meeting and she only served coffee."

  "No!" He huffed a couple of times. "Did she really? Every time Mary Ann McCready came here?"

  "I guess." Mrs. McCready had been ten or fifteen years younger than her grandmother, an acknowledged beauty in her youth. They hadn't been friends as far as JJ knew. "I mean, I don't think Mrs. McCready visited except with the garden club."

  Granddaddy's huffing turned to outright chuckles and then to guffaws. He slapped the table hard enough to make the coffee cups rattle and a knife jump from the edge of a plate. "Audubon silver for the garden club!"

  The corners of David's mouth lifted. He jerked his head toward Lucas, both black eyebrows lifted in in quiry over twinkling eyes. JJ could only shrug. "Don't ask me."

  Sitting there at the round breakfast table set with the good silver, blue willow china, and pumpkin nap kins, bright sun making hot puddles of light on the polished floor, JJ had one of those wake-up moments when an angel taps your shoulder and says "Pay at tention. Don't see what you think you see. See what's really there."

  Across from her, in a white dress shirt open at the neck, sat her grandfather, laughing at a joke only he understood. On his right, David picked up a fork and turned it over in his strong, brown fingers, his brown eyes alight with humor and curiosity.

  It had not occurred to her that everything could be dif ferent if she had someone to share Lucas with. Someone whose mind wasn't already shaped by the same stories told again and again—one hundred years of Caruthers history absorbed with his breakfast cereal. Someone not the least bit intimidated. Someone who found the whole scene amusing.

  David being there changed her. If Lucas was behav ing uncharacteristically, so was she. If she had been alone with Lucas, she would have been sharp or impa tient. Most likely, she would have told him wanting to set the table was ridiculous—assuming she had stayed long enough to see him set it. When was the last time her mind had been open enough to be curious? To not automatically react to what was going on, but instead to wonder what was going on?

  Chapter 37

  EYES STILL BRIMMING WITH LAUGHTER, LUCAS LOOKED from one young face to the other. God, it was good to spend time with young people. Last night he'd made a point to stay out of their way. As much as possible he'd wanted them to feel like they had the house to themselves.

  This morning he had come into the kitchen to find David and the dog already there, and it was the most natural thing in the world to start talking. And now, to have JJ sitting at his table, sharing Caruthers's history with someone to whom it was a new story—he felt like they were a family in a way he hadn't in far too long— maybe since they'd lost Beth.

  The idea for breakfast had come to him this morning when he'd been thinking about what Beth would have told him he had been doing wrong. Which would be pretty much everything. If he could lure JJ to sit down and eat with him, he decided, then he would see that the meal was done right—the way Beth would have approved.

  It was working. David was smitten. Every time he looked at JJ, his gaze was hot and hungry and tender. Lucas might have doubts about what had brought them together, but he had none that David wanted his granddaughter—and would be good for her. JJ had that look everywhere but at him look girls get when they feel the same way but haven't made up their minds to capitulate. Yet.

  Yes, JJ was acting girlish. His heart squeezed to see her young and tender and vulnerable. He had discour aged her from acting this way when she was younger, but he now admitted it was because he couldn't stand the pain of watching her get hurt.

  Beth had accused him more than once of stealing JJ's girlhood. When she should have been hanging out with the other kids, talking for hours on the phone and gig gling about boys, she had been at the car place. It was true, he hadn't made her spend time there, but when she was there, he could feel proud
of her—she had been an unusually responsible kid—and guide her and see her safe. He didn't have to live with fear she was doing the wild, uncontrolled things teenagers are famous for.

  He had loved her, but it had been a selfish, controlling love. It took losing Beth for him to finally see how con stricted JJ's life was. Not a fit life for a young woman. He'd tried to tell her to date, to have fun, experiment some, fall in love, but all she'd heard was more of him trying to control her.

  His threat was finally having the effect he had in tended. Whether she meant to or not, JJ was reaching beyond her tightly organized world. He wasn't going to make the mistake of telling her she ought to try make this marriage a real one though. He would have to study on ways to foster a courtship without appearing to.

  "You're wondering what's so funny," he told the two puzzled young people. "Well, I might as well tell you. God knows, I'm not the hero of this story, but everyone else with the right to tell it is dead."

  "When I was young, I did my best to follow in my father's footsteps. A lot of years went by before I realized he was a strong man, and by the time he died, he was a rich man, but he wasn't a good husband—and I wasn't one either."

  David was watching JJ, not Lucas, as the old man began his story. JJ was looking down, drawing the tines of her fork through her eggs.

  Lucas quirked an inquiring white eyebrow. "Surprised, JJ?"

  JJ looked up, her green gaze cool. "Surprised to hear you admit it."

  Well, wasn't that interesting? JJ apparently believed her grandfather had been a bad husband.

  "Officially the Caruthers were farmers," Lucas returned to his tale, addressing David. "Truth was, my granddaddy ran moonshine, and my daddy, too. Moonshine's where our money came from."

  Moonshine. David hadn't expected to learn his mansion-dwelling bride was the recipient of a fortune made illegally. He didn't look down on it. Hell, his great-grandfather had been a rumrunner. He'd used his fishing boat to bring in bootleg. When Prohibition ended, he'd gone back to fishing.

  "Moonshine's the reason my daddy had money when old John Jessup ran into trouble during the Depression. He gave old John the money to keep the doors open in return for a partnership. But my daddy kept right on being a tobacco farmer and a moonshiner, and let the Jessups run the business. That was a couple of years before I was born."

  JJ presumably knew all this. David wondered when Lucas would get to the point.

  "I set my sights. My brothers could have the land, and Daddy was going to leave me the car business. I started there when I was just fourteen. Worked summers while I was in college. I'm making too long a tale of this."

  He waved the past away with a gnarled hand. After a pause to gather his thoughts, he aimed a shrewd look at David. "You know what the Bible says a man does when he finds a pearl beyond price?" Lucas asked David.

  "He goes out and sells all that he has to acquire it."

  "I wish I could exculpate myself and tell you I didn't know what a pearl beyond price my Beth was. I knew. She was lovely, refined, a real lady."

  He stroked a table knife between thumb and fore finger. "I didn't sell all I had. No, sir. Not me. I was a hotshot. Gonna modernize Caruthers, take it straight to the top. High, wide, and handsome, as we used to say—that was me. Business was my god, and I served it. The Caruthers weren't respectable. The Jessups were. The exact right wife was necessary to my vision of what I was. My ego was big enough to think I'd earned her.

  "The other women—they meant no more than a good cigar, a moment of pleasure, a little recreation. I worked damn hard. I had earned a little play."

  Lucas's sort of reasoning wasn't uncommon among SEALs, many of whom felt their life when they were operating had nothing to do with their marriage, but David hoped Lucas didn't think that explanation would excuse him in JJ's eyes. In fact, the self-centeredness of it probably confirmed the worst of what she thought of her grandfather. And explains her extremely low expec tations of me.

  David checked JJ's reaction to Lucas's bald admis sions. JJ was again looking down, hiding her expression.

  Lucas put down the knife he'd been toying with. "Everybody knew what Caruthers men were like. Hell, I had three half-brothers and two half-sisters, all by differ ent women. My daddy sent every one of them to college. One's a state supreme court judge now."

  JJ's eyes got wide. "I have a half-great uncle on the supreme court? I didn't know that!"

  Lucas grinned, obviously pleased he had managed to surprise her. "It's not a secret, but the connection was never flaunted." Almost immediately he looked contrite. "I should have told you. I should have known Beth wouldn't—not that I blame her. It wasn't her duty to make sure you understood your Caruthers kin. It was mine. I should have taken you to meet them. The judge was the one who convinced Daddy it was time to stop moonshine. But that's a story for another day.

  "Anyway, there were women, but I knew what was due my wife, and it was that she should never cross paths with them. Beth was my wife, and the women were noth ing, nothing to me! Until Mary Ann McCready."

  "Wasn't she married to Ben McCready? The lawyer," JJ asked. Lucas should have stuck to talk of moonshine and bastard kin. JJ's polite mask had returned.

  "That's right. They moved here from Wendell, and he set up a practice. She was one good-looking woman. Red hair. A figure that would stop traffic, and she was looking to trade up.

  "I didn't see her coming. She had me so wrapped up—it's the only time I ever considered leaving Beth. Wasn't long before Mary Ann was zipping around town in a brand new Corvette and suggesting if she had a country-club membership it would be easier for the two of us to meet. Then she got greedy. She called Beth."

  JJ gasped softly, making it clear where all her sympa thy lay. "Was Grandmother crushed?"

  Lucas took a sip of coffee, enjoying spinning out the story. "Beth didn't even break stride," he assured them with smiling pride. "She told me she had learned to live without me, but I had married her to get Caruthers, and, if I wanted to keep it, I could stay married to her. She told me she had made the life she wanted—without me—and she didn't care to change it. She told me to tell Mary Ann it was over. She would take care of the rest."

  He shook his head, laughing. "Now, you got to get the whole picture: she did this with a smile on her face, in the middle of the celebration gala for the symphony, which she had worked for ten years to bring into being. All the time we're talking, people are coming up to congratulate her, and tell me what a fine woman she is, and I'm having to say, 'Yes, I know,' and how proud I am. Over and over, I have to tell the mayor and couple of judges and state senators that I know what a lucky man I am to have Beth Caruthers for a wife. Even Teague Calhoun was there. He was running for his first Senate seat.

  "Beth knew me. Yes, she did. I told her I'd get rid of Mary Ann. 'Don't humiliate her,' Beth told me. 'Someone has said to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I say, it is better to destroy your enemies by making them need you. Mary Ann is ambitious and energetic. With some guidance, she could do well for herself and her husband.'"

  Lucas turned to JJ. "Do you remember how Beth used to tap her lips, and then s-m-i-i-l-e, JJ? Well, she tapped her lips and said, 'I believe I will invite her to join the garden club. She'll make the contacts there that will boost her husband's career.'"

  Lucas paused, like the good raconteur he was, to let the significance sink in with his listeners. "And then, like she was changing the subject, she said, 'Oh, and by the way. You'll be getting a bill for that silver pattern I've been wanting. I'm afraid it costs more than a new car. I ought to get something from this deal.'"

  "Oh my goodness, that's diabolical!" JJ laughed. "She had the whole thing planned. She probably started strategizing the minute she heard Mrs. McCready was flashing a new car she couldn't afford."

  "See why I laughed when you said she used the silver for the garden club? I always wondered how she made Mary Ann pay."

  "How about you?" David asked him. "How
did she make you pay? I don't think being out of pocket for some silver meant anything to you."

  "You're right about that. But trust me, she got me, too. I don't know who she told, but next morning all over town, people were saying, 'Did you hear? Beth found out about Mary Ann, and Lucas had to buy her a whole set of silver from Tiffany's to calm her down.' And then the punch line: 'It cost a lot more than a car!'"

  He laughed again. "I'm telling you, for years, every couple of months, some good ole boy 'ould slap me on the back and say: 'How's the car bid'nis Lucas? Had to invest in silver lately to keep it going?' That was my Beth. You didn't mess with her."

  "Then what happened?" JJ asked.

  "Beth lived up to her word. She never bad-mouthed Mary Ann. She whispered into the right ears, and Mary Ann and her husband got the invitations they needed. Over the years, they prospered. Beth was a lady to her fingertips. She had class. But JJ, you tell me, every time Mary Ann came to this house, Beth served her with the silver. Now that was diabolical!"