Gumpy mumbled something.
“I didn’t catch that,” he finally said, knowing he was taking the bait.
Gumpy straightened. “I think we should make a bet. If she cooks breakfast, she stays.”
“Gumpy, I don’t even know where you found her.”
“At the airport, just like you said.”
“We don’t know anything about her.”
“Just look in her eyes.”
“She lied to you. She’s no nanny.”
“Neither are you. I don’t hold it against you.”
“But I never said I was,” he said with elaborate patience.
“I bet she can do the job.”
“And I bet I’m going to be asked to be the guest conductor for the Calgary Philharmonic.”
“She’s supposed to be here.” He opened the door and cold air blasted in.
Gumpy considered himself to be something of a mystic. He was right about things often enough that Ethan had stopped laughing. He eyed the old man warily.
“If she cooks breakfast tomorrow, you should ask her to stay,” Gumpy said stubbornly.
“Only if it’s good,” Ethan said dryly. Not much danger on either count, but Gumpy looked pleased, like a fisherman who had a strong nibble. “Maybe you should stay in the house tonight.”
Gumpy shook his head obstinately and went out.
Ethan turned back into the house, which was unbelievably silent. If he strained, he could just hear the soft murmur of her voice. He turned on the radio to drown it out. Fighting weariness, he turned off the water main and began to scoop the water out of the toilet.
“The kids are asleep. I’m going to go to bed.”
By now he had out a wrench and was unbolting the bowl from the floor. He looked out at her from where he was twisted beneath the tank. She was standing in the door watching him as though he was performing heart surgery. “Yeah. Sure. First door on the right.”
“I figured it out. The lace doily on the dresser was a dead giveaway.”
He glanced at her sharply. Was she smarter than she looked? He’d put that little scrap of lace out to make it look welcoming for Mrs. Bishop. It was the only doodad in his house.
“Sleep in tomorrow,” he suggested. After all, he had a bet to win. Not that he had much in the way of breakfast makings around, anyway. He hadn’t really had time to properly stock groceries. He had eggs, cereal and instant porridge. Good luck turning that into anything special.
Gumpy wouldn’t consider boiling the water for the instant porridge cooking, would he? Contemplating that, he went back to work.
An hour later, the keys rescued and the toilet bowl reanchored to the floor, he showered, checked on his niece and nephew and walked by Lacey McCade’s firmly shut door.
It occurred to him she hadn’t had a single piece of luggage with her.
Which made him wonder again where she had come from and why. It also made him wonder what she was sleeping in.
Lacey lay awake in the inky darkness. The bed was narrow and lumpy. She wondered what he was sleeping in. Boxers?
She could feel herself coloring to the roots of her hair. Which was a mess.
She was in a strange man’s house, under false pretenses, thinking decadent thoughts. What had happened to her? She was not the same woman who had gotten up this morning, calmly eaten her toast and jam, and headed for work.
Just this morning she had been the fast-rising woman lawyer, preparing for the wedding of the century, and the life of acquiring the stuff—the beach house, the car.
The kids, she realized, had never come up.
A foolish thing not to have discussed with the man you were going to many—presumably the catch of the season.
Lacey replayed the conversation she’d had with Keith, from the airport at Calgary, rather than think any more thoughts about the cowboy in his boxer shorts. Or lack thereof.
“Keith,” she had said, watching a 747 lumber along the runway, looking as if it would never have the power to take off, “Cancel the wedding.”
At the precise moment she had said those words, the plane was suddenly in the air, its huge body soaring upward at an impossibly steep angle.
She surprised herself. Her voice sounded firm and sure and uncompromising.
Silence. Then, “Lacey?”
“Cancel the wedding,” she repeated, more strongly than before.
She pictured him behind his desk, his tie undone, his blond head bowed over some paperwork, though she thought she probably had his undivided attention now.
“I can’t cancel the wedding,” he sputtered. “It’s three weeks away. It’s going to be the wedding.” Long fingers would be scraping back his hair, his handsome features would be marred by a frown, the wrinkles deep in his forehead.
Lacey turned from the bank of windows. The plane was now a speck in the distance. She took a deep breath. On the other side of the pay phone she was using stood a beautiful statue, cast in bronze, protected by a glass case. It was of a cowboy standing quietly beside a horse that dipped its head to water. Something about it had made her ache with an emotion she did not understand.
But that had something to do with the word the. Why did it have to be the wedding?
She would have settled for a wedding. For ordinary things.
She snorted at herself. Since when?
Since precisely three hours ago, when the off-ramp to the airport had beckoned to her so bewitchingly she could not say no.
“Where are you?” Keith demanded.
“I don’t think that’s important.”
“Area code 403,” he read off his call display.
Her eyes rested on the bronze again. When she was a child, she had begged her father to consider the Stampede as a vacation possibility. There had never been money for exotic holidays, though. Not that her father would have considered a rodeo exotic.
Lacey wondered about taking it in while she was here. Then some long-forgotten part of her recalled the Stampede was in the summer. July? And summer was long past here.
Listening, she could hear Keith on the other end of the line, thumbing through papers. The telephone book, she guessed bleakly.
“Canada,” he crowed. “Alberta. Lacey, what are you doing in Alberta?”
“I don’t know,” she’d answered truthfully.
And she didn’t. She only knew that when she had seen the airport sign, she had been compelled to obey something within her that told her to go. To go now. Before it was too late.
For what, she was not sure.
Keith was handsome, gloriously so. And wildly successful in his own right, quite separate from the old family wealth he came from. “A young man going to the very top,” her father had pronounced with grave approval after meeting him for the first time.
And, of course, Lacey had her own career, and though it was not quite as illustrious as Keith’s, between the two of them they were well on their way.
Again, her eyes had been drawn to the bronze cowboy. So still.
Of course he was still, she chided herself with annoyance. He was bronze.
“Lacey,