Read The Proposal at Siesta Key Online
Authors: Shelley Shepard Gray
The Proposal at Siesta Key (23 page)
The moment she passed through the swinging kitchen door, a pretty blond girl about eighteen or nineteen smiled at her. “They just went out the back door,” she said, opening the door helpfully.
“Danke.”
Then, as she finally stepped out onto the back cement patio,
sixâno sevenâpairs of eyes turned her way. Three were her girls. The other four belonged to three boys and one man. One very handsome, very perplexed-looking man with dark blond hair and very light blue eyes. “Hi,” she said weakly.
“Hi,” he said right back. “I hear you're looking for Frankie the beagle?”
She nodded. She was embarrassed, but this was no time to wish for better behaved beagles or less trusting little girls. “He wandered off.” Feeling more than a little foolish, she asked, “Have you seen him, by any chance? He's tricolored and has white feet and a white-tipped tail.”
“Just as if he stepped in paint and got his tail dirty, too!” Mandy supplied. “He really likes pizza.”
“I think we just met a dog with that very description,” the man murmured.
Almost a little too mildly.
Emma just now noticed that he was staring at his pizza box. Then she noticed that the paper plates next to the box hadn't been passed out.
And a slow, sinking feeling settled in.
“Did, um, Frankie find
your
pizza?”
“He did.” When he opened the lid, Emma groaned. At least half the pizza was gone. And the pieces that remained were decorated with paw prints.
Frankie had struck again.
“I'm so sorry. I'll go buy you a fresh pizza.”
His lips twitched. “I'd take you up on it if I didn't feel so sorry for you.”
“Why?”
That's when the boy they'd been talking to silently pointed one finger down below him.
Both Emma and her girls leaned down to see what he pointed to. There was Frankie. Lying on his side, stomach distended, eyes closed.
He was breathing deeply and kind of snoring, too. Orange pizza sauce dotted the white patch of fur on his chest. It was obvious that Frankie was going to have a pizza hangover for most of the day.
While the girls groaned, Emma fought against taking a seat
at the table and silently hoping for some stranger to come along and take over her life for the next four hours. If they attempted to move him, he was liable to throw up. Unfortunately, she knew this from experience.
The man looked like he was trying hard not to laugh. “I'm starting to get the sense that he's done this before.”
“All the time,” Lena whispered. “He can't help himself, though. It's his weakness.”
“I really am sorry,” Emma said, looking at all of the boys and the man. “I don't know what to say.”
“Why don't you tell me your name instead?” he murmured.
Suddenly, a whole other feeling came over her, and this one had much more to do with noticing that he was handsome.
“My name is Emma. Emma Keim. And these are my daughters, Lena, Mandy, and Annie.”
“Where do you live?” the oldest boy asked, who she now realized wasn't actually a boy. No, he was more a young adult.
“Just down the way,” she said evasively.
“We have a white house and lots and lots of orange and cherry trees,” Mandy said.
“We're living here at the inn while my
daed
gets our new
haus
fixed up,” the middle boy said.
“Oh?”
“I'm Jay. And these are my sons Ben, Mark, and William.”
She smiled at them all. “Pleased to meet you. I am sorry about the pizza. If you could wait a minute, I'll run home and get my purse and give you some money to pay for a new one.”
“That's not necessary.”
“But I'm sure your wife won't like your boys missing a meal.” The moment she said that, Emma wished she could have taken back every single word. Now she not only sounded rude but more than a little intrusive.
All four men looked mighty uncomfortable.
“We don't got a
mamm
,” William said quietly. “She's up in heaven.”
“I am mighty sorry to hear that,” Emma said. “It's hard to lose a parent.”
William looked at her curiously. “How do you know? Is your
mamm
up in heaven, too?”
“No, but, um, my husband is.”
A new awareness crackled in the air. The manâJayâlost his smile but he seemed to be examining her more closely. “I'm sorry for your loss, too.”
“Daed, how about me and Tricia take William and Mark to Village Pizza?” the oldest boy asked.
“Tricia?”
“She's the girl who works here, remember? You met her yesterday.”
“Oh. Well . . .”
“They need to eat, Daed.”
After giving him a long look, he nodded. “
Jah
, sure. Go ahead.”
“Can the girls come, too?”
“
Nee
. We don't really know them,” Jay said before Emma could say the same thing.
Ben looked tempted to argue, then shrugged. “Let's go,” he said to his brothers.
“Ben. Manners.”
“What? Oh, sorry. Nice to meet you,” he murmured before shuttling his brothers back inside.
Emma noticed all three of her girls staring in the boys' wake. She wondered if it was because they were new or because they were boys.
She stood up. “Well, um, I think it's time to grab my beagle and be on our way.”
“How will you get him home?”
“I'll carry him.”
He looked extremely doubtful. “Is it far?”
“
Nee
, just a couple of houses down.”
Lena lifted two hands and showed off eight fingers. “Eight of 'em.”
“That's too far for you to carry a heavy dog. I'll carry Frankie.”
“I couldn't let you do that.”
Before she could protest any more, he bent down, contorted himself to slide two arms around a snoring beagle, and with a grunt lifted him in his arms. “He's pretty hefty. Ain't so?”
“He's chubby. Sometimes I think he needs to go on these pizza journeys,” she said as she led him through a back gate and up the side yard to the street. “They're the only exercise he likes.”
“We'll need to change that, I think.”
“We?” she asked as they walked down the street, her girls scampering in front of them.
Looking down at her, he smiled. “I have a feeling between your three girls and my three boys and one beagle with a penchant for pizza that we're going to be seeing a lot more of each other.”
She thought that was a pretty cheeky thing to say. But since he was carrying Frankie, she supposed he had that right. “We do have a lot in common, I suppose.”
“We're a regular widows' club, I think,” he said as they passed yet another home.
That had never been a club she'd imagined she'd be in. “Maybe we could simply be friends. That is, if you're intending to stay in Pinecraft.”
“We are.” Turning, he gazed at her over Frankie's head. “We're here for good. And until this very moment, I wasn't sure why the Lord had called us to move.”
“But now?”
He smiled at her before looking straight ahead again. “Now I'm coming to see that yet again, the Lord works in mysterious ways.”
She had no idea how to reply to that. Therefore she decided to say nothing at all.
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This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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THE PROPOSAL AT SIESTA KEY
. Copyright © 2015 by Shelley Shepard Gray. Excerpt from
A Wedding at the Orange Blossom Inn
© 2015 by Shelley Shepard Gray. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Illustrated map copyright © by Laura Hartman Maestro
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ISBN 978-0-06-233772-6
EPub Edition May 2015 ISBN: 9780062337733
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