Marrying Maddy. Кейси Майклс

for you, you know.”

      “Concerned? Ha! Allie just likes to ’eddle—’eddle. Oh hell, you know what I ’ean.” She concentrated on controlling her numb upper lip. It was probably the same size as her nose by now. “Meddle,” she pronounced carefully. “And she seems to like Matt so much…and I thought she liked me….”

      “She says you’re unhappy,” Joe said, opening the peanut butter jar. There wasn’t much sense in trying to pretend Almira Chandler hadn’t help set up this entire plot. It didn’t have enough twists to make such a defense plausible. So, as he’d stopped lying, he figured he’d go back ten, and punt with the peanut butter and jelly,

      “She had no ’iness—business—telling you that. B-because I’m not unhappy. I’m deliriously happy. Ecstatic, even!”

      “Uh-huh. Careful, or your nose will start growing. You’ve got a hive on the tip of it already, you know. Is it okay if we just have peanut butter? I can’t seem to locate the jelly.”

      “Eighteen months,” Maddy mumbled under her breath as she reflexively rubbed at the tip of her nose. “Eighteen months of getting myself ’ack together, getting myself on my feet…”

      “I’ll take that as a yes,” Joe said, enjoying himself very much. After all, those hadn’t just been Maddy’s eighteen months; they had been his as well. And he hadn’t enjoyed too damn many of them, thanks to her.

      Poor baby. She really did look like she wanted to crawl out of her bumpy, reddened skin. “Would you like a side of calamine lotion with that?”

      Maddy suddenly realized she was going about this all wrong. Using every bit of strength she had, she sat back in her chair and looked up at Joe. “Congratulations are in order, I suppose,” she said coldly, pronouncing every word with care. “You and Loony Larry seem to have hit the jackpot after all.”

      Joe’s one-sided grin made her want to jump up and pop him one in the nose.

      “You always had such a flair for the understatement, Mad. Yeah, Larry and I got lucky. Hard work, genius, the guts to go for the brass ring—they had nothing to do with it. Just dumb luck, that’s all. Enough monkeys, working at enough keyboards, or however that goes, probably could have done the same thing.”

      “That’s not what I meant,” Maddy said, mentally biting her tongue before she could tell him not to call her Mad. She’d die before she’d tell him that, before she’d say anything else he could use against her. Wasn’t it enough that he was using her own grandmother against her? The Harris house against her? His handsome, smiling face and well-remembered body against her?

      Did she want his well-remembered body against her?

      No, no, she couldn’t think that way, wouldn’t think that way. Joe was the past, long gone and supposedly forgotten. She refused to think about the hives.

      Besides, Matt was her future. Kind, sweet, undemanding Matt. Theirs would be a safe, comfortable marriage, the two of them content with their mutual interests, a desire to settle down, to start a family. Matt wanted children; Maddy wanted children. And they genuinely liked each other. What was so wrong with that?

      “No, of course that’s not what you meant,” Joe was saying, bringing Maddy back to attention as she tried, rather vainly, to picture Matt’s face in her mind’s eye. “You’re happy for me, I’m sure of that. It’s just a shame you couldn’t have been along for the ride, as it was a lot of fun. I guess you were too busy here in your safe cocoon, finding yourself a nice, safe guy to marry. Banker, right?”

      Maddy had a quick vision of her grandmother standing in the center of a huge pot as she, Maddy, lit a fire under it. “Matt is a b-banker, yes. And we’re very, very happy.”