A Fine Mess (7 page)

Annie shook her head, trying not to stare. She’d never seen Ian in anything other than dress clothes. Even at the company picnics, he’d dressed in casual slacks and polo shirts. This morning he wore black tee shirt tucked into the waistband of softly faded blue jeans.

She wished he didn’t look quite so handsome standing there.

“Uh- No,” she finally answered. “I just didn’t think you meant it quite so literally when you said you didn’t cook.”

“Well, you were wrong, weren’t you?” Apparently today was his turn to repeat her question. She chose to ignore it and asked, instead,

“Do you object if I cook?” She watched him shrug.

“Have at it if you want. But don’t feel like you have to. Food isn’t all that high on my list of priorities.”

“It must rate right up there somewhere because you’re still walking around,” Annie said with just the smallest bit of sarcasm. He shrugged again.

“The only food worth eating in my book is a steak and baked potato, bacon and those cookies you saw in the cupboard. I haven’t been sufficiently impressed with other things to care one way or another.”

“So you’re basically a ‘food is for fuel’ kind of guy?”

“Pretty much, I guess. So cook away if you want.” He glanced at the cupboards. “We’ll have to get some groceries first, though.”

“
Ya think?
” She couldn’t help but chuckle and was soon joined by Ian. “I’ll make a list.”

“Make it in the car. We need to find somewhere for breakfast and then beat it over to your folk's house.”

As they walked into the elevator, Annie pulled the little notebook out that he’d given her on the plane.

“So steak, potatoes, bacon and cookies go on the ‘acceptable’ list. Anything I should put on the ‘hate’ side?” He appeared to mull the question over for a moment then scowled slightly.

“Pasta salad and green bean casserole.”

“Any pasta salad in particular?”

“Any pasta and salad dressing that share the same space would make it onto the ‘hate’ list.”

~~~~

Ian had lied to his wife.
And during the first twelve hours of marriage no less.
He had been more than sufficiently impressed with her hot fudge cake. But seeing a beautiful woman standing in his kitchen wearing blue jeans and a sleeveless white top, auburn curls tamed a little from a recent washing, had wiped most thoughts from his mind.

He caught himself up short.
Beautiful woman?
No matter that she was his wife, thoughts like that could cause complications in an already complicated situation, and he sure didn‘t need that. Though he supposed he didn’t mind the fact that she wasn’t, as his grandmother might have said, homelier than a bent shovel.

He also supposed that he was glad that she had decided to make the best of a bad situation. His suggestion, on the return flight, that they make things as easy on themselves as possible and at least try to be friends had obviously been a worthwhile one.

“Are you going to come in for a minute or do you just
want
me to send Dad out?” Annie was asking. Ian hadn’t even realized they’d arrived at the Blake house. Not a good thing, given that he was the one doing the driving.

“I’ll come in and say hello to your mother,” he said quickly, hoping she hadn’t noticed that he’d been lost in thought. “She’d probably think it was odd if I didn’t.”

“Trust me, she would,” Annie said dryly, turning to face him and lowering her eyelids. “Ian, I hope you know how grateful I am that-”

“Stop it,” he snapped, brushing off her thanks. “I like your father. I don’t want to see him go to prison anymore than you do, Annie. And this is helping me, too. I don’t have to wait another seven years to escape my father. I’m just sorry that you have to be caught in the middle.”

“Well, I still want you to know that I appreciate it. More than I can say.”

“You're welcome,” he told her grudgingly. Her feeling beholden to him didn’t set well. “Now I’m sure I just saw a curtain move so someone is waiting for us to come in.”

As he’d done every time they got in or out of a car, he walked around to her side and held the door. He might not have dated often in the past, but his grandmother had instilled in him the qualities of a gentleman. Something she’d made sure he understood extended beyond the “I do’s.”
Forever, in fact.

“Ready for the show to begin?” he asked, taking hold of her hand. Annie nodded, not looking at all sure that she was. “From here on out, we’re deliriously happy newlyweds.” She laughed a little.

“Deliriously happy?”

“
Deliriously
.”

~~~~

“You both look tired,” was the first thing Maddie said when they walked into the living room.

“Yesterday was a pretty long day,” Ian told her, walking over and leaning down to kiss her cheek. A little belatedly, Annie thought, he asked, “Was that okay? I guess I should have asked first.” Her mother laughed merrily.

“You're married to our daughter now,
which
makes you our new son. Of course it’s okay.”

“Good, then I’ll do it again,” he said facetiously. And he did. Then he grabbed Annie’s hand again and pulled her to the sofa where they sat, his arm around her shoulders.

“So tell me about the wedding. Well, the ceremony,” Maddie insisted, looking at her husband, who sat on the arm of her chair still looking pretty miserable. “They make such an adorable couple, don’t
they
, Paul?”

“They do,” he murmured, not meeting anyone’s eyes.

“It was all very nice, Mom,” Annie cut in, hoping to spare her father anymore grief than he was already suffering. “Unfortunately all we could find was an Elvis impersonator, but he was dressed really nice in one of those white jumpsuits.
The kind with all the sparkles.
I’m not sure exactly what that ceremony was about but it was short and to the point. And he did sign the license so I suppose it’s legal.
At least in Las Vegas.”

“
Annie Blake!
Please tell me you’re pulling my leg!” Maddie
gasped,
her eyes wide with disbelief.

“Actually
it’s
Annie McCann now,” Ian corrected with a smile.
“Shame on you, Annie.
She
is
pulling your leg, Maddie. We were married by a very respectable minister in an actual church. And I have a couple of pictures to prove it.”

“Pictures!
Oh, can I see them? Please?”
 

Surprised, Annie watched him pull them out of the pocket of his tee shirt. Before he could get back up, her father scurried across the room to retrieve them and take them back to her mother.

“Oh, these are wonderful,” she exclaimed. “You had flowers, Annie!”

“Yes I did, Mom. Roses and baby’s breath, just like we always planned.”

Actually it had been pretty traditional for what had amounted to a spur-of-the-moment elopement. Ian had worn a very handsome charcoal gray suit and Annie had worn the palest pink lace, mid-calf length dress, purchased to wear in a cousin’s wedding the previous spring. Very nice, really, even though it wasn’t the white gown she‘d always planned on wearing on her wedding day.

But then she’d always planned that, when she got married, it would be to a man she loved and would make a life with. Not a man she barely knew with a five year time limit hanging over her head.

“Well, Maddie. Much as I hate to cut this short, Paul and I need to head over to the office for a couple of hours.
 
I don’t know if he mentioned it, but we need to take care of a couple of things we couldn’t get to earlier in the week. It shouldn’t take long at all, should it, Paul?”

“No, not long,” her father said quietly.
Almost too quietly.
Annie sure hoped he got with the program soon.
Before her mother grew suspicious.

“Will the two of you be able to stay for supper?” Maddie was asking. Annie looked at Ian, who said,

“There’s nothing I’d enjoy more, thank you.” Then he kissed Annie quickly, promised to be back as soon as possible, and left with her father.

“My but you really picked a winner,” Maddie decided, smiling happily.
“Handsome, charming.
And he seems to be quite the gentleman.”

“He’s all that and then some, Mom.”

“I’m so glad, Sweetie. All I’ve ever wanted is for you to be happy. And you are, aren’t you?”

“You have no idea,” was all Annie could think to say. But she was. Happy her father would stay safely out of jail.

“And was your wedding night all you’d ever hoped it would be?”

Oh now
there
was a question she hadn’t been expecting! She sought for a way to answer it without giving away the true state of her marriage.

“I- Mom, all I can say,”
she
finally managed, “is that I have absolutely no complaints!”

Chapter 4

“You make a lousy thief, Paul,” Ian said casually, lounging in a chair in the corner of Paul’s small office. As always, he found that he felt very at home here, whereas the rest of the office was rather cold and impersonal, Paul had pictures of his wife and daughter on the walls, a ceramic-
something
on the desk that Annie had made in grade school, along with a few other things Maddie had sent in to ’spruce’ things up a bit. “I doubt that many of them keep step-by-step records of what they did.”

“They do if they plan on putting it back,” his new father-in-law mumbled absently, working furiously on his computer.
As he had been for the past three quarters of an hour.
A few moments later the sound of the computer shutting down filled the air and Paul looked up and sighed. “It’s all there. Well, in the computer anyway.”

“And it’ll all be in the bank before noon on Tuesday.”
Just as soon as he had the release of funds in his hands.

“You do know that if they call in the auditor anyway, and he really looks at everything, he’ll find the discrepancies.”

“I can pretty much guarantee the auditor won’t be coming now. Everyone knows you’ve been under massive amounts of stress. Once I ‘figure everything
out‘ and
find where the mistakes were made, it’ll be fine. Especially now that I’m married to your daughter and you’re family. Do you really think anyone is going to question my authority?”

“Your father wouldn’t hesitate if he thought he’d been stolen from.”

“But if I find that it was just a mistake, he won’t say anything. He likes to maintain the appearance of being a doting father. He’ll pretend he trusts my judgment, even if he doesn’t believe it. But in this instance, as I said before, no one would blame you if your mind wasn’t entirely on the job, not with everything your family has been going through.”

“Well see. It would be a crying shame if you and Annie did all of this for nothing.” Ian had never known Paul to be so pessimistic.

“Trust me, Paul. My father might not hesitate to press charges against you, but he’d cut his own throat before he’d see me in jail.” Paul’s head snapped up and he stared at him in stunned surprise.

“
You?
In jail?
Why?
”

“I think I would now be considered an accessory to embezzlement. And don’t even start beating yourself up over it,” he said quickly, seeing where things were headed just by the look of horror on the other man‘s face. “I knew exactly what I was doing so it was my choice, not your fault. Now let‘s get out of here. Our wives are expecting us for supper.”