Something Unexpected (13 page)

Setting her spoon on her plate, Rosie leaned back in her chair and held up a hand. “Lord, no, I'm stuffed to the gills. Making up for lost time, I guess. Everything was delicious.”

“Here we are.” Holding a silver tray, Josef and Annette, owners of the Honeyford Inn, approached the table. “A special dessert, just for you.” With great care, Annette set before Rosie a china plate with a thick square of darkest chocolate topped by a marzipan rose. A gold ribbon bow sat on the edge of the plate.

Rosie looked at the creation with something approaching alarm, but recovered well and smiled charmingly at the pair that hovered over the table. “It's beautiful. Did you make it here?”

“Yes!” Annette nodded eagerly. “One of a kind. With a surprise inside.”

“Mama, shh.” Josef patted Annette on the arm then pointed a gnarled finger at the plate. “Taste.” He waggled his thick gray brows.

Dean grimaced. Subtle as a sledgehammer.

Rosie looked slightly sick at the thought of more dessert.
“That dinner was
so
fabulous, and the bread pudding was amazing. I don't think I have room for anything else right now.” She lifted the plate to hand it across the table. “Maybe Dean—”

“No!” Josef and Annette both stretched out a hand. Startled, Rosemary clunked the plate back onto the table.

Dean narrowed his eyes at the duo.

“We want
you
to try it.” Josef looked at her appealingly. “Dean, he's been coming here since he was young. It will mean more if you tell us how
you
like it.”

“Oh. Well…I suppose there's always room for a tiny bite.” Picking up the small silver fork sitting on the plate, she sliced a piece of the dense chocolate and chewed obligingly. Her smile was only a little strained. “Delicious.”

Josef looked worried. “No, eat the rose.”

Dean shook his head. “Maybe you could give us a minute—”

But Rosie was already dutifully forking up a marzipan petal and raising it to her lips. “Mmm.” She looked as if she could barely swallow. Once she'd managed the feat, she set down the fork and sat back. “It's a lovely dessert. Are you putting it on the menu?”

Annette and Josef looked at each other in grave concern. Annette began to wring her hands. They both turned to Dean.

It was hardly the way he'd envisioned the moment. Reaching for the plate, he pulled it toward him. Nestled amidst the formed flowers, was the object of the whole dessert. He plucked it out of the marzipan, stood and didn't even bother to try to exile Annette and Joseph.

“Excuse me,” he said, shouldering past them. When he reached Rosie, he knelt. Her eyes turned into huge hazel moons as he held the ruby ring out to her.

“It's taken my entire adult life—and no small part of my
adolescence—to find you,” he began. “I've imagined what life would be like with a woman who was my best friend, my partner in all that's good and my bulwark against the tough times. I've imagined what it would be like to be that person for someone else, and I've never trusted that I could be, not a hundred percent. Until now.”

He reached for one of her hands, resting limply in her lap while she gaped at him. Holding her fingers and the ring, he gazed steadily into her eyes, unmindful of the whispers that circled the room.

“Rosemary Josephine Jeffers,” he said, “will you be that woman, that partner and friend, and allow me to be yours? Will you believe in me when the going is rough and trust that I believe in you, too? Because more than anything in my life right now, I would like to be your husband.” He took a breath and hit the bull's-eye. “Will you marry me?”

Josef sniffled. The room went utterly silent, save for a watery “Awww” in the background. Dean's heart pounded the seconds as he awaited a response from the woman who appeared, currently, like a photograph taken immediately after someone had jumped out and yelled, “Surprise!”

Well,
he thought, swallowing around a knot in his throat that felt as if he'd overtightened his tie,
that went well.

 

The first time a man had asked her to marry him, she'd choked on a pepperoni. Choked in joy, of course.

Rosemary had been dating Neil for three-and-a-half years. At the time of the proposal, he'd been preparing for his second year of law school, and she had recently packed all her worldly goods to move to Seattle, where she was going to earn her Master's degree in Library and Information Sciences.

“Maybe we should get married,” Neil had said over a large pie—half pepperoni and green pepper for her, half kitchen
sink for him (if only she'd realized then that he had trouble discriminating).

“I'm leaving for U of W in two weeks,” she had protested (admittedly weakly) once the pepperoni had gone down. Washington had one of the top-ranked Library Sciences programs in the country. She'd been planning since high school to get her degree there. She'd had an apartment, her student loans and a part-time job at a local public library all lined up. Neil had known that. They'd talked about it, talked about how they would navigate a long-distance relationship.

“You can get your Master's in Portland.” His goofy smile had massaged the cavalier comment into something romantic, daring almost.
Give up your plans for me, baby. Love will make it worth the while.

And she had seen it then, if she'd been honest enough to admit it—his fear that the “the long-distance thing” would not work. He had known he would stray.

At the time, however, Rosemary had told herself Neil couldn't wait to marry her, that he was itching to be a family man. She'd insisted to herself and her sisters and mother that true love really did exist and that marriage wouldn't hold them back; it would be the wind beneath their wings.

It hadn't even bothered her that her student loans had not transferred, that she'd wound up working full-time in the Multnomah County Public Library System—first shelving books and then as a clerk—while she went to school, that she had developed migraines, or that she'd slept an average of four hours a night for two years. What difference did any of that make, she'd told herself, in the long run? She and Neil were bound to start a family soon, anyway; she'd be staying home for several years once their first baby arrived since no way was she going to repeat her own childhood. She would get her degree now and use it in the future.

She and Neil had gone ring shopping together and purchased
what they could afford at the time—Black Hills Gold bands with a diamond chip for each of them. He'd lost his on a river-rafting trip (white water, after all) before their second anniversary. She had cherished hers until the day she'd taken it off for good.

Now, a good decade after that first proposal, she stared at what appeared to be a diamond-crusted platinum band with a heart-shaped ruby nestled in the center.
Yowza.
Unless Dean's morning cereal had come with an unusually good piece of costume jewelry, this was the real deal, and it was a ring like nothing she had ever imagined on her finger. The only thing that brought the confection down to earth was the marzipan gumming up one row of tiny prong-set diamonds.

“Will you…” he had just asked on bended knee. With a great preamble.

What he had not said:
Will you marry me, Rosemary Jeffers, mother of the baby we did not plan, even though we've already agreed we're going to divorce before we've picked out a preschool?

He knew and she knew they were going to get married; he needn't have bothered with the trappings of a proposal.

A muffled whimper cut through Rosemary's thoughts, and she glanced beyond Dean to Annette, who clutched Josef's hand and compressed her lips so as not to sob out loud.

Unlocked, Rosemary's gaze traveled the intimate, candlelit room to see that the customers at all five tables in the Honeyford Inn's cellar were glued to the action as if it were the final rose ceremony on
The Bachelorette.

Surely the news would travel upstairs to the main dining room before the end of the evening. By tomorrow more and more people would know that the hometown pharmacist had proposed to Honeyford's new librarian as prettily as any man deeply in love.

And suddenly Rosemary realized: he'd done it this way to
get the ball rolling. By the time people discovered she was pregnant, the myth that she and Dean loved each other to distraction would be the stuff of local legend. Their child could grow up in Honeyford and never hear that he or she had been “an accident.”

She looked again at the man who knelt before her. In the dim light Dean's blue eyes looked like a calm sea, steady and eternal.
Take your time,
his gaze told her.
I'm not going anywhere.

Surely she was supposed to speak now. A small dining-roomful of people waited for her to complete this über-romantic moment. But über-romantic dialogue required some emotional investment, and she had no idea what her emotions were at present. Was it normal to feel numb and sort of dazed and that was all when a man said all the right things and then presented you with a ring that would rock the world of any girl who had grown up staging and restaging her engagement with Barbie dolls?

Finally Rosemary had a good proposal with which to entertain her children and grandchildren. Dean's proposal was one she could recite again by heart for their fiftieth anniversary party at the Governor Hotel in downtown Portland. It was a proposal from which tender excerpts could be culled for inclusion on side-by-side tombstones.

Damned shame that none of it was real.

Probably fewer than thirty seconds rolled by, during which Dean remained calm and charitably patient, but a quiet murmur arose in the peanut gallery. “Did she hear him?” someone whispered.

She knew she should respond immediately, but…

This could be my last—and best—proposal. I should at least know what I feel.

Gratitude. She felt grateful that he'd wrapped their child—and her, as well—in a gauzy fairy tale, for the time being
anyway. Maybe it wasn't very forthright or very modern, and perhaps Oprah would frown, but she'd rather have people gossip about her whirlwind courtship than her one-night stand.

Besides gratitude, she felt…affection, actually. Dean Kingsley had taken this entire situation better than most men would have. He was kind. And he had integrity.

And besides gratitude and affection, there was that feeling of lust that kept cropping up, especially when she looked at his ears. It was weird, her reaction to those ears, but he had longish earlobes. Longish earlobes that had felt velvety when she'd nibbled on them back in December. There was something about long lobes that said
stability.
You could grow old with them.

For an instant an image slashed across her mind. Two old people, one with curly gray hair and one with long ears, sitting on the porch of a sweet two-story house with dormers, a stone chimney and a birdhouse they'd made themselves hanging from the branch of an oak tree. The old couple laughed as they reminisced….

“Remember when Montana told the neighbor boy she had a magic hat that made people fly, and they climbed onto the roof to test it out?”

“Remember how Nate used to sit under the oak tree with Buster and tell that old dog all his secrets?”

Oh, my gosh, they even had an old dog….

There was a for-sale sign on the front lawn, because now that it was just the two of them, they were moving to something smaller. Their new place still had a formal dining room, though—she'd insisted on that—for big family Thanksgivings and Christmases. And on the wall of their new living room they intended to hang a photo of the house that had held their family so sweetly during the growing-up years….

Swallowed tears put a lump in Rosemary's throat.

She looked at Dean, so calm, so steady, and her foolish heart began to hope.

What if she was getting one more chance at forever? Maybe…just maybe…this time—

Hic.

Oh, no.

Hic-hic.
Oh, holy heaven. She slapped a hand to her breast-bone. Her worst case of hiccups yet began the assault on her diaphragm.
Hic-hic-hic.

“Rosie?” Dean's expression, previously the picture of forbearance, began to exhibit some tension. “You all right?”

Her eyes bugged at Dean. Poor Dean. This was not a proper response at all. “I'm fine—”
Hic.
“Ow. Maybe a little water—”
Hic-hic.
Ohhh, why did she eat the whole bread pudding? Every hiccup felt like a blender churning the contents of her stomach.

“Push under her ribs, once. Hard,” Josef instructed as Dean stood.

“That's for choking.” Annette slapped her husband's arm. “She should suck on a hard candy while drinking a glass of water with one tablespoon of cider vinegar. I'll get it.”

Rosemary groaned. “No—”
Hic-hic.

Dean put a hand on her shoulder. It was warm and comforting. “Is another massage in order?” he whispered, a brow hooked.

She hiccuped in his face.

“Have her jump up and down on one leg and—”

“She should sing the national anthem while—”

“Put your fingers in your ears and hold your breath for a full minute.”

Pelted by advice, Rosemary's head began to ache as much as her stomach. Only the hand on her shoulder provided relief, and she wanted to lean into it, to rest against the body in front of her. She was tired. All the worries and uncertainty
and secrecy of the past few weeks had been exhausting. Was Dean exhausted? Her eyes met his. He cocked his head.

Oh, Dean. Poor, poor Dean. He had publicly proposed and earned a spate of hiccups in response. She looked for the ring in his free hand, prepared to give him the public acceptance he deserved. He really was a gentleman, a decent person, a—