When You Wish (Contemporary Romance) (25 page)

The Jewels, Olaf—no surprise—Mrs. Cabilla and Perry, which explained why he hadn’t been able to get hold of them, some gray-haired guy he didn’t know and . . . double-damn.

His parents.

“Mother.” He nodded. “Father.”

“Daniel, who was that woman I found in your room?”

“Nice to see you, too, Mom. How long has it been?”

As usual, his mother ignored both his sarcasm and his question. “She looked native. I take it she’s the latest in your string of rebellious behavior.”

Dan narrowed his eyes. “Where is she?”

Suddenly Dan hung several feet above the ground from his collar. “Gracie was in your room? All night long? Bad man, say your prayers.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” Dan’s father demanded. “Put my son down this instant.”

Olaf shook Dan like a puppy with a scrap of cloth. “No.”

Dan’s mother and father looked confused. They did not know what to make of a person who said “no” to them. When the Drs. Chadwick spoke, the world listened and obeyed.

“Olaf, sweetie-pie.” Em stepped forward. “Put the doctor down.”

Her fuchsia peignoir swirled about her ankles. Dan’s mother looked as if she’d swallowed an entire cup of lemon juice. Dan would have laughed if Olaf hadn’t been choking off his air.

Olaf shook him again. Dan was starting to see stars and hear tweety-birds. “He is a very bad man. He must die. Say bye-bye.”

“Babycakes, you promised me when you dragged me out of bed that we would only make sure Grace was all right. No killing before noon.”

“A hill beneath the moon?” Garnet shouted.

Dan’s mother jumped a foot.

Ruby put an arm around her and said, “Never mind my sister, she eats the dead.”

Penelope Chadwick turned green. She would be quite disconcerted to know the shade did not match her suit.

“Olaf!” Em stamped her foot.

“No, Em. I love you with all my huge heart, but here I draw my line in the mud. He touched Gracie with inappropriateness—a lot. He must die.”

“I love her,” Dan managed.

Olaf dropped him. Dan hit the ground, hard, and lay there gasping for air as the entire group gathered around, staring at
him with varying degrees of differing emotions.

“Love is good,” intoned the long-haired man.

“Who the hell are you?” Dan growled.

Mrs. Cabilla appeared next to the stranger. “This is
Abuelo
. My new husband.”

“Uh-oh.”

Perry’s weasel face wove into view, but instead of a sarcastic comment, he shrugged. Life just got weirder and weirder.

Dan was dizzy from all the conflicting subjects, not to mention the lingering effects of strangulation and a head injury, so he just lay where he’d fallen until the world quit revolving.

“Love?” Olaf shouted, loud enough to wake the dead. “Bah! You do not know the word.”

Dan needed to sit for this argument. He did, happy to discover the tweety-birds had quit singing, then he looked up, up, up Olaf s monstrous frame and met the man’s still-furious eyes. “I do know the meaning of the word. Love means Grace. I mean to marry her.”

“Marry? Are you insane, Daniel?” That was his mother.

His father said, “You don’t marry them, Dan. Sleep with them, maybe. Marriage never.”

“What exactly do you mean by ‘them’?”

“Women like this Grace.”

Olaf hissed. Em held him back. Dan was almost sorry to see Olaf let her. His parents kept blathering blindly on. Why had he ever cared what they thought?

“Daniel, we came here to make peace. To offer you our support for your work. We’ve heard about your new project. It has possibilities. But if you insist on continuing with this latest rebellion, I’m afraid we’ll have to leave without giving you your check.”

Dan stood. “Shove your check, Mummy and Daddy.” His mother gasped. His father turned red. “I love Grace. I
will
marry her. The new project you heard about is her project, and I mean to help make the dream come true.”

“You’re choosing that woman over your family”

“What family? I haven’t spoken to you in five years. I doubt I’ll miss you over the next ten. Family means love. Love means—”

“Never having to say you’re sorry,”
Abuelo
put in.

“That, too. But it also means accepting people as they are, no matter what. Loving them for who they are and not despite it. If you love someone, they don’t have to prove themselves worthy. They
are
worthy, just because they are.”

“You choose her over your own flesh and blood?”

“You wouldn’t know flesh and blood if it bit you on the butt, Mother.”

She looked at him as if he’d dropped his pants in the dining room at the country club. “How attractive, Daniel. I should have known that by living with trash, you’d become trash.”

Dan did a little “ta-da” shuffle and swept out his arm in a flourish. “And that, ladies and gentleman, is why I live alone.”

Everyone laughed but his parents. No surprise there. How had they managed to get through life without a sense of
humor? Easy answer. They’d managed, but they had not discovered the joy in life—the joy Grace had given him.

The Chadwicks left without so much as a wave, but then they’d never been much for touchy-feely good-byes. Dan wasn’t sorry to see them go. But where was Grace? She’d missed all the fun.

“You know, the money’s yours.” Perry spoke for the first time. “Miss Lighthorse withdrew her application.”

“Well, unwithdraw it.”

“Sorry. She says you need the money more than her.”

“I don’t need the
money at all. I thought the entire point of us working together was for one of us to bow out. I’m bowing out.”

Perry looked like he’d swallowed something too big for his skinny neck. He looked at Mrs. Cabilla and spread his hands wide.

“What’s going on here?” Dan asked.

“I don’t know how to explain,” Mrs. Cabilla said.

“Try the truth.”

She sighed. “Yes, well, um . . . I just wanted you and Grace to find each other. That’s why I had Perry give you the ultimatum, set up the conference call, and then leave you stranded at the house.”

“Matchmaking?”

“Guilty. But it worked. Perry never thought it would. He said you were too stiff and Grace too free-spirited. But
Abuelo
and I know how opposites attract.” She shot a smile filled with adoration at the strange little man who held her hand.

“So Perry dislikes me becau
se I’m stiff, and dislikes Grace because she isn’t?”

“Not exactly.” She shrugged. “Perry doesn’t like anyone but me.”

Dan glanced at Perry, but the weaseled one had already retreated out of earshot. “Makes for a sad life.”

“I know. I plan to turn my matchmaking skills on him next.”

“Good luck,” Dan muttered.

“But, Dan, I can’t have you giving up on your research, regardless of your love for Grace.”

“I’m not giving up. My research is done,
thanks
to Grace. I let her take me away yesterday, and because I left an experiment alone, rather than hovering over it, the thing produced.”

“Splendid!” Mrs. Cabilla clapped her hands. “I said you needed to—”

“Walk a mile in another’s feet,”
Abuelo
interrupted.

She flipped her hand in an airy gesture. “Yes, that. And it worked.”

“Well, I solved the mystery. I know the secret. In a few more days I can finalize my preventative for paronychial infection.”

“Where is Gracie?” Olaf interrupted.

“My question exactly,” Dan said.

Everyone, at last, went silent.

“You don’t know?” Em asked.

“I left her in my room.”

“When we got here, your mother and father were all alone in the lab.”

“Oh, no.” Dan could imagine the scene he’d missed. His mother was queen of scenes. “I’ve got to find her. Where would she go?”

Panic set in. What if Grace disappeared and he never heard from her again? He’d only discovered the power of love, the amazing peace to be found in Grace’s arms. He’d also just picked up a great, big package she needed to see.

“Her car is still here, bad man.”

Dan raised an eyebrow at Olaf. “Do you think you could stop calling me that?”

“No.”

Dan sighed. Olaf had let him live. Dan would let well enough alone.

Olaf was right. Grace’s car was right where she had left it. He glanced at the woods. Where else could she be? He retrieved the package from his car, admonished everyone else to go home and mind their own business for at least a day, then he went in search of Grace.

Within a half an hour, he was lost. Actually, he’d been lost all of his life—until yesterday.

He’d be lost for the rest of his life, unless he found her, or she found him.

Dan found a tree, hugged the trunk, just for the hell of it, and sat down at the base to wait.

Grace stompe
d through the woods, cursing beneath her breath. She’d gone from devastated to downright furious. How could the same thing happen to the same person in the same lifetime?

Bad karma. That’s what it was. No more men for her. Ever.

She’d given up Project Hope for him. At least for a few hours. Her walk to Mrs. Cabilla’s had been a futile attempt to use exercise to make the urge to cry and shriek and kick someone abate. She’d planned to take the grant right back, but neither the woman, nor her minion, were anywhere to be found.

Now she had to walk back to Dan’s and get her car. Sometimes she was just too dumb to live. She hoped Dan’s wife, and her classy chauffeur, whom Grace had snarled at as she stomped toward the woods, were gone by now.

She should never have run off. She should have stayed right there and blasted Dan as soon as he showed up from wherever it was he’d slunk off to. One thing she’d learned from the Jared incident, closure was necessary. She had not had closure with Jared, and he’d haunted her for far too long.

She intended to
have closure with Dan—right after she punched him in the nose.

“Help?”

Grace stopped, tilted her head and listened. “Anybody out there?”

Grace sighed. Another lost camper. While she was in no mood for search and rescue, she could not just walk off and leave someone alone. Even if she sent back the cavalry, the lost wanderer would no doubt have wandered off.

Grace followed the sound of the voice, which, oddly enough, didn’t sound panicked, but it did sound familiar.

When she emerged into a clearing, she discovered why. Dan Chadwick was hugging a tree. He looked ridiculous.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like? I’m lost.”

“You are not.”

He let go of the tree. “I am. And I’ll always be lost without you.”

“Ah, go tell it to your wife.”

“My who?”

“Penelope Chadwick.”

“My mother?”

Grace gaped. “Your-your . . .”

“Mother. What did she say to you?”

“She looked too young to be your mother.”

“I’m sure she’d be thrilled to hear that, as would her plastic surgeon. Happily, I’m no longer talking to my family, so I won’t be able to pass along the compliment. Now why in hell would you think she was my wife?”

“It’s happened before.”

He looked confused. “You’ve met her before?”

“No, I’ve met the wife of the man I thought I loved, although last time I wasn’t fresh out of his bed, but at my father’s funeral.”

Understanding dawned. “This would be the first man you slept with?”

“Bingo.”

“Ah, baby, I’m sorry. He’s pond scum, but I’m not. I promise. What did my mother say to make those eyes look so sad?”

Grace was having a hard time getting her mind around Dan calling her ‘baby’ without sounding silly, before she moved on to the fact that Dan’s wife was actually his mother. Or rather he didn’t have a wife, but he did have a mother. Whom he wasn’t talking to. Grace had jumped to a whopper of a conclusion.

Dan suddenly snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Grace? Stay with me here. What did she say to upset you?”

“That I was your latest rebellion. You do this a lot, Dan?”

“Fall in love? Never.”

“Love?” Grace couldn’t seem to stop repeating him like an idiot.

“I meant to tell you this morning. I meant to tell you a lot of things. Like how I’m lost without you. How I want to marry you.” He held out a manila envelope. “And I wanted to show you this.”

Warily she took the offering, tore open the package and skimmed the contents. “What is it?”