She's With Stupid Page 18

  Emilie nodded in resignation. “Six is fine.”

  “Great, I’ll see you guys then. Don’t be late.”

  Kate gave them a warning look before shutting the door and absently waving as she pulled away and drove down the square.

  “That was weird,” observed Lana.

  “She’s been acting weird a lot lately,” Emilie noted. “I’ve never seen her jump to attention like that for Will before.” She pursed her lips in consternation. “I can’t believe she got me to agree to dinner. She’s like an annoying little terrier with a bone.”

  Shrugging, Lana threw an arm around Emilie’s tense shoulder. “You’ve got to chill,” she ordered. “You and I have the right to do anything we want to do with whomever we want to do it with — no matter how stupid or ill-advised it may be. Don’t let Kate tell you any different.”

  Emilie smiled and elbowed Lana in the ribs.

  Kate entered Room 35 of the Motor Lodge off of I-75 and casually threw her purse on the table next to the bed. She had been here many times before and was comfortable enough with her surroundings that she did not even hesitate before swiftly shucking her coat, sweater, and jeans, leaving her clad in only her bra and underwear. He would be arriving soon, and she didn’t want to waste any time once he did.

  She felt a little guilty for razzing Lana and Emilie about their love lives when hers was so out of whack. But at least she was aware of how screwed up her relationship with Will was, and she was fully prepared to admit to herself that she was not handling things as best she could.

  With a sigh, Kate silently acknowledged that she was probably behaving so badly due to a minor case of pre-wedding jitters, but she had plenty of time to work through those jitters before her actual wedding day. All she had to do was take things one day at a time, while constantly reminding herself that she would be the laughingstock of her entire family if she tried to back out now.

  Kate sat down on the bed and leaned back on her elbows, staring off into space as she contemplated how strange it was that she was going to be married in three months. But that was the path she had chosen to take, and any misgivings she might have would just have to be pushed to the back of her mind before May.

  The door opened and a man stepped inside, immediately grinning at Kate’s provocative pose. She returned his smile without hesitation as he quickly divested himself of his clothes and stalked towards Kate with an intent gleam in his eyes, pausing only to toss a box of condoms on the bed beside her.

  “Feeling a bit overconfident, are we?” Kate asked breathlessly.

  When he merely raised an eyebrow and grabbed her legs to pull her closer to the edge of the bed, Kate gasped. And then she practically purred when he settled on top of her and began nibbling on the side of her neck just the way she liked.

  “Am I wrong to be sure of myself where you’re concerned?” he asked cockily. When she stared silently up at him and shook her head, his smirk deepened. “Then shut up and take your panties off, Katie.”

  Rather than waste time on a reply, Kate happily obliged before pulling his mouth to hers for a kiss. After that, neither of them said a word.

  Chapter 13

  Kate picked up the phone on her second ring. “You’d better not be backing out because dinner is already made.”

  “I didn’t know I was invited,” said the amused male voice on the other line.

  She grinned and balanced the phone on her shoulder so she could continue wiping the smudges from the mirror hanging behind her couch. “Oops! Sorry for snapping at you, cuz. I thought you were Em calling to cancel our plans. She’s been trying to get out of coming all weekend, but I’ve managed to evade her excuses thus far.”

  “Why would she want to cancel on you?”

  Kate wasn’t fooled by Ethan’s casual tone, especially not when she could practically hear him holding his breath for more intel on Emilie. She managed to swallow a smart aleck remark, and said lightly, “She has some kind of secret shame she knows I’m going to weasel out of her later, so she’s trying to delay the inevitable.”

  There was a pronounced silence on the other end, and she smirked into the phone. Ethan was undoubtedly contemplating this new tidbit of information and filing it away in an overstuffed box marked “EMMY” in that stupid head of his.

  Kate heaved a mental sigh and promised her reflection that she was going to reward herself with a flat screen TV like the one in Emilie’s apartment when those two idiots finally stopped messing around and got together already.

  “Well?” she asked. “To what do I owe the honor of this call, cuz?”

  “Sorry, I know it’s been a few weeks,” he said contritely. “You wouldn’t believe how many papers you have to sign in order for the U.S. government to pull their hooks out of you. Then my mom wanted to enact some kind of mother-son bonding ritual that involved me taking her to the mall for an entire week of manicures, purse shopping, and discussing the importance of settling down and marrying a nice girl.”

  “So that’s where you disappeared to.” Leaning back into her couch to relax, Kate laughed at the affectionate dismay in his voice. “I thought maybe you’d changed your mind about settling down and decided to stay in the Corps after all.”

  “Definitely not. That’s why I called, actually. I wanted to let you know that I am now officially discharged from the United States Marine Corps. I’ve been blasting “Free Bird” all week,” he said with a chuckle.

  His relief at having regained his freedom was so palpable Kate could practically hear the smile in his voice. “That’s really great, E. Any ideas about what you’re going to do now?” she asked stealthily.

  “My buddy already sent over the contracts. I’m going to become a full partner in his security business, so I’m all set on the job front.”

  An amusing image popped into her head of twelve-year-old Ethan trying to convince Emilie that cops and robbers was a time-honored game and she should, therefore, feel no hesitation about allowing him to capture Kate and hog-tie her to a tree as penance for grand theft bicycle. Emilie had relented only after she’d secured his promise to pick flowers with her later that evening. It still made Kate laugh to remember the pleased blush that had stained Ethan’s cheeks when Emilie had given him a big, wet kiss for so readily agreeing to her terms.

  “Where are you staying now?” she asked absently, still grinning at the memory.

  “Actually, uh—”

  The hesitant hitch in his voice interrupted Kate’s fond recollection of Ethan before he had decided to complicate things by becoming a butthead.

  “Actually,” he repeated again in a hoarse voice. “I, uh, bought a place last week in, well, it’s in New Bern. It’s over on the east side near St. Mary’s Academy.”

  She paused in her examination of a strange gunk on her living room wall. “Interesting…” Emilie taught at St. Mary’s. Ethan was well aware of this fact because he was always grilling Kate for any and every detail about Emilie’s life. Her eyes narrowed at this new development. “Tell me all about it?” she asked, trying desperately to keep her amusement concealed.

  “It’s really nice,” he said defensively. “It’s one of the oldest homes in town, I think, and it’s kind of big for just me, but the moment I saw it I just had to have it.”

  “Oh yeah?” Kate had a sneaking suspicion that Ethan was about to describe a white Victorian farmhouse with lots of tall, green-shuttered windows, pitched roofs, turrets, and a wraparound porch straight out of Anne of Green Gables. If her hunch held true, she was going to laugh her ass off.

  “Uh-huh,” said Ethan, blissfully unaware of Kate’s escalating glee. “It’s right by Rhineland Park. It needs a little fixing up, but it’s got these great hardwood floors and the rooms are real spacious and there’s lots of natural light from all the windows. And it has all this really well-kept whitewashed brick, a big porch, there’s even a little glass conservatory back behind the house, Kate. It’s pretty amazing.” He sounded quite pleased with both hi
s purchase and with himself.

  Kate’s eyebrows lifted at his description of his “amazing” new house because, just as she had suspected, it sounded familiar. It had to be the farmhouse on Orchard Lane. Built in the 1800’s when that section of town had still held apple orchards, it was known affectionately by New Bern locals as the “Apple House” thanks to its two apple-topped weathervanes and a colorful stained glass rendering of apple blossoms in full bloom over the front door. It was pretty, it was charming, and it was quaint.

  It was also Emilie’s dream house. The girl drooled every time she drove past it and had been doing so since the age of eight, when her mother had forced her to take piano lessons from the ancient rich lady who had owned it.

  “Wow,” Kate said with a huge grin plastered on her face. “I’m impressed. Where exactly is this castle?”

  Ethan coughed in what Kate could only assume was embarrassment. “Uh, it’s over on Orchard Lane.”

  She so planned on torturing both Ethan and Emilie with this romantic gesture for quite a few years to come. But for now she decided to tread lightly, especially now that she knew exactly how badly Ethan had literally screwed Emilie over in the not-so-distant past.

  “That sure sounds like a significant purchase, cuz,” she said. “And here we all thought you’d never stay in one place for very long.”

  “You thought wrong,” Ethan said decisively. “I’m sick of constantly moving and never feeling like I can catch my breath. New Bern is where I plan to spend the rest of my life — you can tell Emmy Thatcher I said so.”

  Kate laughed aloud at his petulant tone. “Oh, I will,” she promised. “Of course, she probably won’t believe me. You did a pretty stellar job convincing her that scientists would conclusively prove that the moon is made of ice cream before you willingly settled down anywhere.”

  Her reminder of his past mistakes ruffled Ethan’s feathers, just as she’d known they would. “Emmy is going to have to accept that I was an idiot back then and forgive me.”

  “I believe idiot does not adequately describe your past behavior, Ethan,” she said acidly. “Unmitigated bastard seems much more appropriate.”

  There was a pronounced silence from Ethan before he finally cleared his throat and said quietly, “She told you?”

  Kate looked at the phone with disdain before putting it back to her ear. “You had to know she would tell us eventually, Ethan. For the record, Lana and I both feel certain that if we looked up the word ‘tool’ in the dictionary we would find your face grinning stupidly up at us.”

  Ethan sighed. “You might be right. But that was a long time ago and I’m done feeling bad about it.”

  “How nice for you,” Kate said in a decidedly dangerous tone.

  “You know what I mean,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry as hell I behaved the way I did, but I know she’d forgive me if she’d only try. I’ll admit causing a scene at your engagement party might have been the wrong way to go about gaining her forgiveness, but I’ve given her a couple of months to cool off now and I won’t let her keep on ignoring me. She’s been playing possum with me for years and it’s going to end now.”

  “My, aren’t we all manly and decisive,” she cooed sarcastically.

  “I just know exactly what I want now,” he said calmly. “I’m not going to rest until I’ve got it.”

  “I think you may be in for a rude awakening, my friend,” Kate said. “I’m fairly certain that her recent experiences have only strengthened her suspicions about the trustworthiness of the opposite sex. You’ve got your work cut out for you.”

  “What recent experiences?” he asked darkly.

  Kate sighed, annoyed with herself for even mentioning it. Bringing Leo into the conversation was probably not the brightest move on her part considering that, in the past, whenever she may have casually mentioned a guy Emilie was dating Ethan generally overreacted and threw a male hissy-fit.

  When she had revealed that Emilie’s first boyfriend, Edgar, had ginger hair and freckles, he had sulked that freckled men were stupid and pale and Emilie preferred tan guys with dark hair. When Kate had told him about Emilie’s college boyfriend, Peter, and his love of arts and crafts, Ethan had dourly predicted that he was probably gay and then crowed about it for weeks when he had later been proven right. And when Emilie had been dating that Homer guy, Ethan had laughed himself silly and declared that a guy named Homer wasn’t worth worrying over. Kate hadn’t even mentioned the poor man’s unfortunate allergy to Emilie because she had feared Ethan would give himself a hernia if he laughed any harder.

  As for Leo, Kate already knew Ethan couldn’t stand him. He had kept her up late the night of her engagement party regaling her with a detailed list of everything that was wrong with Leo, and cataloguing all the reasons why he was not right for Emilie and why Ethan was. It had been eminently funny.

  “Katherine.” His tone was eerily reminiscent of her father when he was displeased with Kate in some way, causing her to wince.

  She sighed dramatically before relenting. “Emilie just had a pretty bad break-up with Leo.” Kate could hear him grinding his teeth and—growling? Sheesh. “He’s proving difficult to ditch. Like some other people I could mention,” she couldn’t help but add.

  “Don’t go there,” he warned in a voice that brooked no argument. “I refuse to be compared to some jerk Emmy barely knows. Now tell me what the guy did to her so I know how bad I have to hurt him.”

  Kate rolled her eyes at his display of machismo. “Oh, chill out, Romeo. I don’t know what’s going on, exactly, other than that they broke up a few weeks ago for reasons I am not at liberty to disclose but now he’s decided Emilie is the cat’s meow and he can’t live without her.”

  “And she’s buying that crap?”

  “I don’t think so, but you know Em. She hates hurting people’s feelings no matter how bad they’ve already hurt hers.”

  Ethan grunted. “She doesn’t seem to have that problem with me.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re different.”

  She could practically hear Ethan’s grin through the phone. “Indeed I am. And the sooner Emmy realizes that, the better off we’ll both be.”

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you, Ethan. You screwed the pooch big time, and I don’t think she’s inclined to forget about it anytime soon.”

  “We’ll see,” was his cryptic response.

  Kate shook her head as she got up to put the garlic bread in the oven. Ethan had always been certain that he could get whatever he wanted as long as he was patient and persistent. In that respect, he and Emilie were a lot alike. It was also precisely why they had been having this standoff for the last decade — neither of them had been willing to bend.

  “Good luck, I guess,” she sighed. “Look, Lana and Em will be here in a few minutes, so I’ve got to run.”

  “How ‘bout I stop by later and check in on you guys?”

  Kate laughed shortly at his sly tone. “Do what you want, Ethan. But if Emilie ignores your sorry butt again, don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning.”

  Lana pulled into Kate’s driveway later that night at exactly 5:45 pm. Emilie had been quiet on the ride over —she hadn’t even blinked when Lana had begged to be allowed to drive her car— and Lana wondered if she and Leo had had yet another confrontation at school that day.

  He had called her a dozen times over the weekend, but Emilie had staunchly refused to talk to him. Then, when he had called for the fifth time last night, Emilie had taken the phone from Lana and practically hissed into the receiver, “I told you that I wasn’t interested in anything more than friendship, Leo. If you can’t handle that, then you’re going to have to leave me alone.” Emilie had paused while he responded and then she had lost her patience and shouted, “Stop trying to make me feel guilty about this! I mean it—leave me alone!”

  She had then slammed the phone down, softly counted to ten, and asked Lana if she would like to order a pizza for dinner. Since Lana ha
dn’t heard a peep from Brian since their casual, entirely meaningless sexual encounter on Friday, Lana had nodded and morosely instructed Emilie to order garlic dipping sauce for her crusts. They had then spent the evening watching Clark Gable movies and bemoaning the fact that all the good men were dead.

  Now, bracing themselves for a tense dinner, they exited the car and trudged up the walk to Kate’s modest yellow house. The one-floor dwelling was definitely compact, and the little red shutters and white picket fence made it look like a life-size dollhouse from the outside. The door was open, so Emilie walked into the living room with Lana right behind her. They paused in the doorway to survey their surroundings.

  “They’ve really done a lot with the place,” Emilie said wryly.

  Looking around the sparse beige room, Lana grinned. Kate plainly wasn’t much for color. There was an old tan couch that Kate had commandeered from her mom’s basement, a mint green chair that Will had brought to the relationship, and an ancient twenty-four inch TV sitting on a banged up card table. Every season of Friends was lined up on the floor below the TV, but there was not much else in the room besides a few scattered pictures.

  “At least it’s clean,” Lana said loyally. “But where’s the cat?”

  Emilie made an eek! face and shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe she put it in the bedroom?”

  “Hey, guys, I’m back here,” called Kate.

  They meandered into the kitchen at the back of the house and sat down at the relatively new table Kate had purchased when she was still single. Emilie immediately noticed that there were several new watermarks from where Stupid Will must have forgotten to use a coaster.

  Kate was already dishing out what smelled like lasagna from her slow cooker when the girls sat down, and they inhaled appreciatively.

  “Mmm, smells delish,” exclaimed Lana.

  “Thanks. I love this thing. Emmy’s mom gave it to me for my birthday last year, and I use it practically every day.”