Authors: Mary Margret Daughtridge

SEALed with a Ring (24 page)

Of course, she recognized that the events that day had merely been the culmination of hundreds of abandon ments. Even before her parents died, she had decided she was safer and better off with Caruthers.

Chapter 36

"GOOD MORNING, GENTLEMEN," JJ SAID.

"Here you are!" David smiled like his welcome was a gift he'd made just for her. A few days ago she would have discounted his smile completely. Today? More like fifty percent. She was beginning to believe his assertion that he wanted her for herself.

"I was getting ready to call you," Lucas said. "I told Dave if we waited for you to cook, we'd get mighty hungry."

JJ forced the corners of her mouth to move at the joke gone stale long ago. Nobody expected men to be born with a skillet in their hands, and she doubted if Lucas had ever fixed anything more complicated than microwave popcorn.

"No time for breakfast." Her mind was already on how she would juggle her schedule today. The bank's loan manager wanted yet another meeting, and Lucas had to see his cardiologist. "I'm glad I caught both of you together. I hate to dump dog care on Esperanza, but I don't see any other way." she informed them. "I don't think he'll be a lot of trouble. If he gets worse, she can call Ham—"

"Don't go bothering Ham or Esperanza," her grand father interrupted.

JJ's short fuse ignited. "Granddaddy, you know you cannot get him into a car by yourself!"

"Young lady, I reckon I can figure out how—" Lucas snapped back. Abruptly, he switched tracks and whipped out a salesman's smile. "But I knew you were going to say that, and I don't want you to worry. Dave and I have got it covered."

"Covered, how?"

"Now, now, we have it all worked out. He's going to hang around here, and maybe we'll ride around awhile. Esperanza can call us if she needs us. I thought I'd show him the marina, and then while we're out, we'll go to Topsail and pick up some clean clothes for him."

"If you don't mind letting me have a key to the cot tage," David inserted. "Tell me what you need, and I'll bring clothes for you too."

"We'll take the Rover—it's four-wheel drive—that way we can ride down to the inlet, if we want to," Lucas expanded his plans. "Wish we still had the Jeep. We'll stop and get some barbeque sandwiches."

JJ didn't know when she'd seen her grandfather so enthused. Too bad he'd chosen today of all days to want to do something besides sit in his office. "I hate to rain on your parade, but Lucas, what are you thinking? You have a doctor's appointment today."

Behind Lucas's back, David shook his head in warn ing. With hand gestures so clear it was like hearing every word, he signaled, "Leave him to me. I'll take care of everything." He added a mischievous grin and a thumbs-up.

Aloud he said, "Since we just simplified your day, you've got time to eat."

JJ goggled at him, unable to articulate her feelings. She had spent a restless night that these two men, both singly and combined, had been the cause of. She'd lain awake mulling over the fact that she now had not one, but two men who would disrupt her life at will. And now
they
were male bonding, planning joyrides, and getting ready to eat perfectly scrambled eggs.

She didn't know how the hell she had failed to fore see this. Not the part about the scrambled eggs, but that these two would like each other.

In each, a charm that drew both men and women overlaid a ruthless will. Unfettered by society's restric tions, they adhered to principles they had hammered out for themselves—which made them very reliable friends and very dangerous enemies. Even the age gap and their widely divergent lifestyles worked against her, since their differences buffered their tendency to compete with each other for dominance. They would still both try to dominate her.

She knew how much these men
took. She didn't kno
w how much thinner she could spread herself. Neither was the kind of man who could be controlled, but singly she could have managed them. Allied, she didn't have a chance. She watched every bit of leverage she had had circle the drain.

"The eggs are almost ready to take up," David said, taking her silence for consent to join them for break fast—which it probably was. "Have we got plates?"

"Ready," said Lucas. "I got out the breakfast china," he told JJ with pride. "Your grandmother isn't here, but it's what she'd say to do. Do you know which napkins go with it?"

Breakfast china? Lucas had never set a table in hi
s life, that she knew of, and suddenly he wanted the "breakfast" china and coordinating cloth napkins. The plates he'd gotten out were part of a very old set. She had no idea what made them, in Lucas' mind, break fast china.

"Which ones, JJ?"

"Which plates are you using? The blue willow? This close to Thanksgiving, grandmother always liked to use the pumpkin napkins."

"Pumpkin."

"The orange-y brown ones."

He extracted three and piled the rest—the entire con tents of the drawer they usually resided in—on the end of the counter. She wondered fleetingly if he'd realized for himself the damask ones were inappropriate, or if he hadn't found them.

"And in the fall, she liked to use the oak leaf place mats," she told him.

"Placemats."

"Dining room sideboard, second drawer down."

JJ braced herself for her grandfather's impatient, "Well, get them," or for him to say the everyday ones were fine. Instead, with more jauntiness than she'd seen in a while, he made his way to the dining room.

"Don't forget the
breakfast
forks," David called out. He threw her a conspiratorial grin while keeping his voice smooth and innocent. There was a drawer full of stainless-steel flatware right at David's hip, as he very well knew, having dried the flatware and put it away last night. Clearly amused by Lucas's need to set an elabo rate table David was adding elaborations of his own.

Again she was struck by how his brown eyes always seemed so clear and full of light.

Lucas laid down the placemats and returned to the sideboard where he opened the silverware drawer. In it, twenty-two dividers organized the accumulated silver of several generations of Caruthers and Jessups. Though if he were seated at a table, he would have unerringly picked up the right fork, no matter how complex the place setting, he stared into the drawer overwhelmed by choice. "JJ?"

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 an
d 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?

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