The Lilac Bouquet Read online

  “Been what?” Emmy Jo asked.

  “Smart but a little odd. There’s just something strange, and I don’t think you should be around him,” Diana said. “So if you are going to be stubborn, then you can’t stay here.”

  “Tough love?” Emmy Jo snapped.

  “Call it what you want. Drive over to Graham and get a hotel for tonight if you are determined to do this thing. Or be smart and go home and call it off,” Diana said.

  “You got any idea why this is such a big thing? It’s only a two-month position, not a contract to work in a mental institution for the criminally insane.”

  “You know what they say about Seth Thomas’s mama.”

  “I also know what they say about my granny,” Emmy Jo said. “There’s got to be something a lot deeper, maybe something that even the best gossip hounds in Hickory don’t know about. Logan’s grandpa and Seth are the only folks I know of that Granny despises. Maybe I’ll figure out why while I’m working up there.”

  “Whatever it is, it don’t need to be dug up. ’Bye now.”

  The steering wheel took a pounding. And the words that came from Emmy Jo’s mouth were so hot they came close to fogging the windows. Dammit! This was not fair.

  She had been sure she could sweet-talk her way into the house and that Diana would let her stay. Now she’d have to go to the hotel after all. That would take money from her wedding fund.

  She sighed and checked for any phone messages, hoping that Diana had told her to park around back and sneak in through the garage door. Her hopes soared when she saw there were three messages but plummeted when she saw they were all from Logan.

  “Well, crap!” She gazed up at the twinkling stars. “That’s not even nice. I’m sorry, God. I love Logan and I’m glad that he sent messages, but I don’t want to drive to Graham tonight.”

  The first message said that Logan and Jack had gone fishing but caught nothing. The second one said he loved her and was on his way back into town. The third asked her to call him as soon as she could.

  “So that’s why he didn’t answer when I called. There’s no reception on the creek.” She groaned as she pulled over to the side of the road and hit his number.

  “Where are you? Jack just talked to Diana and—”

  She butted in when he paused. “I’m not giving up this job.”

  “Let’s just go to the courthouse tomorrow and get married. We’re both over twenty-one and we don’t need a big wedding. I love you, Emmy Jo, and I’m worried about you,” Logan begged.

  “I love you, too, but I’m having my wedding. These two months of work will bring in enough that I can buy everything we’d like. Since it’s a twenty-four-hour job, five days a week, Ruth is paying me the same as if I’d worked three shifts a day. Do you even realize how much money that is? It’s the equivalent of six months’ paychecks in only two, and I won’t pay for rent or food. This whole town will be invited to our wedding to see we are doing things right.” Saying no to Logan had never been easy, but this time her heels were set.

  “You are one stubborn redhead,” he chuckled. “Want to meet at the park?”

  “Sounds good. We can see if that might be a good place for a June wedding. Give me ten minutes to get turned around and drive back to town.” She’d have to be strong, or else he’d wear her down with his deep Texas drawl.

  “They’ve got peanut parfaits half price tonight. We could sit at the picnic table and eat while we talk venues for the wedding.”

  Not even an oversize sundae was going to make her change her mind. He’d have a better chance if they shared the hotel room that night than ice cream.

  She parked beside his truck, checked her reflection in the rearview to reapply lipstick, and then got out of the car and headed toward the picnic bench. He waved, and her pulse kicked up a notch. After all this time, she still got butterflies in her stomach when she saw him. Six feet tall, dark haired and green eyed, Logan didn’t look a thing like the men in his family. They were all blonds, neither short nor tall, and square built.

  “I’m going to miss seeing you every night.” Logan’s mouth went dry at the sight of her.

  “It’s only for two months, and I get Tuesdays and Thursdays off from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon.” She walked into his open arms and wrapped her arms around his neck. His heart skipped a beat and then raced ahead. He hugged her tightly and then stepped back just enough that he could tip up her chin with a fist. Her long lashes fluttered, and her tongue flicked out to moisten her lips. Time stopped, and like always, when their lips met in a passionate kiss, he felt as if they were in a vacuum—completely alone and secluded. When the string of kisses ended, he groaned and pulled her toward the old wooden picnic bench.

  “I’d rather make out all night,” he said, “but we’d better start eating or it’s going to melt. You know it’s a sin to waste ice cream, and, Emmy Jo, I’m only off every other Saturday afternoon and Sunday. How are we ever going to see each other if you take the job?”

  “You get half a day through the week when you work Saturday morning, right? Take it on Tuesday or Thursday and we can have that time together, plus on those two days I’ll meet you for lunch,” she said.

  “Evenings are going to be long. What if you let me help pay for the wedding and didn’t have to work the full two months?”

  “That’s not proper. The bride’s family pays for the wedding.” She sat down at the table and dug down deep into the sundae. “Mmm, this is so cold, you might need to kiss me some more to keep me from freezing.”

  “Oh, honey, we can’t let that happen.” He cupped her cheeks in his hands and kissed her again, tasting ice cream and the sweetness that was just naturally Emmy Jo. “Think that will do it?” he whispered.

  “I’m not sure. Brain freeze might be setting in.” She smiled against his lips.

  “Well, we’ll have to take care of that.” He pushed her hair back and lowered his mouth to hers again. “I could do this all night.”

  “We should take this to the hotel,” she panted.

  He shook his head. “I can’t tonight, darlin’. Wish I could, but it’s not possible.”

  “Tough love?” she asked.

  He cocked his head to one side. “What?”

  “Diana won’t let me stay at her place, and now you are turning down a night with me at the hotel. Are you playin’ the tough-love card, too?”

  “No, I have to spend the evening with Grandpa,” he said. “Besides, tomorrow is my morning to work the drive-through window, and it opens an hour earlier than the bank. And if I go to the hotel with you, neither of us will get any sleep. But I really don’t want you to work for Seth. Please change your mind. My grandpa says Seth is strange, and I worry about you being up there.”

  “You are the second person tonight that’s said that about him.”

  “Was the other one Tandy?” That mean old gal probably hated Logan even worse than she did Seth and Jesse combined. That his relationship with Emmy Jo had survived had certainly been in spite of Tandy Massey. She’d tried every way in the books to break them up.

  “No, she says things a lot stronger about him and your grandpa.” Emmy Jo laughed.

  “So?”

  “What?” she asked as she took a small bite of ice cream.

  “Who said that Seth was strange? We all really did think that place was haunted when we were kids.”

  “Diana told me,” she answered. “And she won’t let me stay with her tonight unless I give up the job. I’m not doing that. I’d shovel crap out of his horse barn for the money I’d make. It’s going to give us a fabulous wedding. And I promise, if I see a ghost, I’m out of there.”

  Logan chuckled and then laughed out loud. Emmy Jo could always turn a situation into something humorous. Poor old Seth might be getting more than he wanted when she arrived at his mansion up there on the hill overlooking Hickory.

  “Does he have a horse barn? Maybe the ghosts are hiding in there,” Logan tease
d.

  “You know rattling chains would scare the horses, but if they do I’ll scoot right on home to Tandy and listen to her tell me that she was right eighty times a day,” she answered.

  He brushed a soft kiss across her lips. “One more time and then I won’t mention it again tonight. Will you please not do this?”

  “Logan, I would die for you. I would fight a forest fire for you or face down a tornado to save your life, but I am going up there on the hill tomorrow morning and I’m going to do the job. This wedding is important to me, and not even you can talk me out of getting that money.”

  “You work with a dozen women who’d jump at the chance to make that much money in such a short time,” he said in a last-ditch effort to convince her that this was a bad idea.

  Her pretty red ponytail flipped back and forth when she shook her head. “When Mr. Thomas’s sister called to make the offer, my boss asked everyone in the place, starting with the most senior. I was the last one on the list. There is no one else. Now it’s become as much about principle as the money.” She stopped long enough to eat two bites of ice cream before she went on. “Why the big fuss? He’s an old man who’s broken his hip and needs a helper. If it was Henry Clary, they’d give me medals instead of grief, so what’s the big deal?”

  “I will support your decision, but I don’t agree with it,” he said.

  She covered his hand with hers. “Darlin’, we have been through far worse than this—your parents don’t like me, my granny doesn’t like you. It’s like Romeo and Juliet, though those two knew why their families were at war, at least. We don’t even get that much. But we are strong as steel, and don’t you forget it. Even if Seth is an oddball and strange, I can endure it for two months.”

  “I wish I could take you home with me.” He mentally kicked himself for not moving into the trailer with his friend Jack when they came back to Hickory. If he’d only done that rather than moving into the church’s garage apartment, there would be no problem with her spending the night with him.

  She rolled her big round eyes toward the stars. “That would go over about as well as prom night.”

  Logan shivered at the memory of when Tandy caught him kissing Emmy Jo good-night after his senior prom. He’d thought she might really fire that sawed-off shotgun she’d waved around when she flipped on the porch light.

  “It was not pretty,” Emmy Jo said. “But back to the job issue. Nora said I’ll have a room on the second floor with my own bathroom. Mr. Thomas never goes up there, and with a broken hip, I don’t see how he could, anyway.”

  “Will you promise me that if you feel threatened or weird, you’ll throw in the towel and leave?”

  “I promise, and if there are ghosts or if my hair starts going gray or if I gain forty pounds the first week, I’ll get out so fast it’ll give everyone in town something else to talk about.” She smiled and kissed his cheek.

  He resisted his desire to pull her in for a deeper kiss in favor of the subject at hand. “Don’t tease. No one knows a thing about that house and very little about Seth. He’s been a recluse for more than twenty years.”

  “The only person who has been in the house in all these years is Oma Lynn Smith, and Granny says that no one has ever been able to get a word out of her.” Emmy Jo lowered her voice. “But then, no one will get one out of me, either, with that nondisclosure we all had to sign at Hickory Health Care. Speaking of privacy, you sure you can’t follow me to the motel? I could sure use a night in your arms before a two-month dry spell.”

  He ran a thumb down her cheek. “I can’t tonight. I promised Gramps that I’d watch a movie with him. He’s been such an old bear lately that I’m hoping this might soften his mood toward us.”

  “I liked it better when you were in college,” she said. “No one there cared about us or even knew there was a Hickory, Texas. Will you meet me at Libby’s for coffee before work?”

  “Be there at six thirty. I’ll have doughnuts and coffee on the table.” Logan planted a kiss on the tip of her nose. “But remember, we can be at the courthouse on Monday morning if you change your mind.”

  “My job will end on the last day of May, and I want my wedding to take place the next week. So let’s plan on June 10,” she said.

  “We have a definite date, then?” He grinned.

  “We do. I’ve always wanted to get married in the summer, and I can plan the wedding and get things done in the evenings.” She slapped a mosquito from her arm. “That ends this place as a venue for sure. I don’t want my guests to spend the whole evening swatting mosquitoes.”

  “Guess that means we should get out of here. I’ll plan on lunch on Tuesday with you.” He drew her into his arms for a long good-night kiss. He’d never get tired of the way her body felt next to his, the heat between them, or the way nothing else mattered when they were together. It had been like that since they were sixteen and eighteen and had only intensified through the next five years. Now they were twenty-one and twenty-three, and he hoped that when they were ninety-one and ninety-three they’d still feel the same way.

  “We can text and call every evening.” She panted as she slipped her hand into his and pulled him up with her. “I love you, Logan.”

  He gently squeezed her hand. “Love you, too, Emmy Jo.”

  When they reached her car, Emmy Jo rolled up on her tiptoes and wrapped her arms around Logan’s neck, pulling his face to hers for a final kiss. He thought she was stubborn and bullheaded, but so was he. He was supposed to go into the ministry like his grandfather and father, but he’d wanted to study finance, not the Bible. It had caused so many arguments in his house that he’d told her he was glad to get away from his family and go to college.

  Her heart melted when she looked into his green eyes. If he’d asked her right then to meet him at the courthouse on Monday morning, she might have changed her mind. But he hugged her tightly one more time and then got into his truck.

  Half an hour later she had checked into the motel in Graham and was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “I will have my wedding, and the whole county will know about it.”

  Her children would have a father listed on their birth certificates and everyone would know that she was legitimately married at least nine months before the first one was born.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Most days Seth Thomas loved his sister, Nora. What he liked best was that she lived more than two hundred miles away. But on his birthdays, when she sent useless presents and pried into his business, he wasn’t too fond of the old gal. That year she called two days early, just before he left the hospital after hip surgery, to tell him that she’d hired him an assistant. He yelled and grumbled and griped, none of which did a bit of good. Nora had already signed the contract and paid half the money, and the lady would arrive that very morning.

  He did not need a distraction in his routine, especially when he was healing from the surgery. What was Nora thinking? Just because the doctor wouldn’t give him a release to drive his car was no reason for Nora to pay good money for someone who would only have one job a week—to drive him to the cemetery on Sunday afternoons to put lilacs on his mother’s grave.

  His housekeeper, Oma Lynn, had been taking care of the cleaning and cooking for the past twenty years. He could have given her fifty bucks to do that extra bit and not had to endure another person in his house every day.

  Nora’s birthday was at the end of May, and he had a whole month to think about payback. Maybe he’d have a truckload of cow manure dumped on the front lawn of her big house in Amarillo.

  The phone beside the table rang, and he grabbed it. The short cord didn’t reach quite far enough, leaving the heavy base dangling. “Hello,” he growled as he got a hold on the thing and set it beside him on the chaise lounge.

  “Happy birthday, brother.” Nora’s voice came through loud and clear. “You must have been expecting my call, because Oma Lynn didn’t have to take the phone from the office to the patio for you.”


  “I’m not deaf. You don’t have to yell.” Of course he expected her call. She always harassed him on his birthday in one way or another. This year she was doing double time.

  “Still grumpy as ever, I see. Should I come to Hickory and cheer you up?”

  “You’ve already done enough to ruin my day.” Dammit! Just thinking of having a perfect stranger coming to his house every day and getting in the way of his routine was enough to aggravate Jesus himself.

  Nora giggled. “Oh, don’t get comfortable, because I’m about to tell you all about the rest of your present.”

  “You’ve done enough, thank you,” Seth said. “Please, Nora, I’ll pay you back the money you’ll lose if you break that contract. It’s not too late to cancel this thing.”

  “I will not,” she declared. “There’s more. She is going to live in the house. That way someone is there all the time until you are free to drive.”

  “Please tell me this is an April Fool’s joke,” he whispered. Un-damn-believable! What was Nora thinking—telling a stranger that she could live in my house?

  “It is not. I’m too old to come to Hickory and take care of you. I tried to hire Oma Lynn to stay with you twenty-four hours a day, and she wouldn’t do it. So you will have an assistant.”

  “You might do well to remember that you have a birthday and I will get even,” Seth said.

  “Oh, boy! Send me one of them male dancers. The ladies here in the assisted living center will love him.” Nora giggled.

  “You are pure evil,” he fussed.

  “I am watching after my brother the best way I know how. He’s all I got left in the way of siblings, and I don’t want him dead just yet,” she said seriously.

  “Today he wishes you didn’t even remember you had a brother.”

  “You’ll get over it. And Seth, get a cordless phone or I’ll send you one for Christmas.”

  “Damn technology and sisters both,” he muttered.

  “I love you, too. Have a lovely birthday,” Nora said.