The Groom Came Back. Abby Gaines
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her hand or…something. “I like to think I do a great job for my clients—not that Alice at Darling Buds isn’t very talented,” she added hastily.
She totally lacked the killer instinct she needed for Fresher Flowers to flourish on the scale her loan officer demanded.
Jack’s smile turned confiding. “I’m in a hurry. I need—” he glanced around in the blankly searching manner common to most men who walked into Callie’s store “—some flowers.”
She might be short on killer instinct, but her sense of mischief was in full working order. “Are they for your wife?”
He recoiled. “I’m not—”
She saw in his frown the sudden uncomfortable realization that here in Parkvale, Tennessee, he was indeed married. Even if no one else knew about it.
He folded his arms and looked down at her—she’d forgotten how tall he was—his mouth a wry twist. “They’re for my mother, Brenda Mitchell. Do you know her?”
“I know her well. She’s wonderful.” Callie let a trace of what she felt for Brenda into her voice. But although Jack picked up on it—his dark eyebrows lifted a fraction—there was still no flash of recognition. Nor did he endorse her comment about his mother.
So much for Brenda’s insistence that Jack missed his family. That he wanted to come home from his prestigious job at Oxford University Hospital in England. That he would have come home sooner, if only there wasn’t always another life to save.
Callie had suspected for a long time that Jack had simply outgrown his family. Only she knew that, if he had his way, this visit would sever one of the last of his ties.
She held his gaze and smiled warmly, giving him one more chance to click. “How much would you like to spend on your mom?”
“Since you know her, how about you make up something she’d like, without worrying about the price?” He glanced at his watch—platinum not steel, she guessed—then out the window, checking on the black Jaguar parked in the street.
“How generous of you.” A little nip, not strong enough to qualify as a bite.
Now those expressive eyebrows drew together. “Excuse me?”
You can’t make up for eight years of absence with a hundred-dollar bunch of flowers. “Brenda likes irises,” she said, with a fierceness that was at first on Brenda’s behalf, because she wouldn’t dream of criticizing her darling son, and then for Callie herself. “And delphiniums.”
He blinked. “Irises and delphiniums it is, then,” he said in a calm tone she could imagine him using with a patient while he waited for the men in white coats.
If she’d told him Brenda liked carnations and pansies he wouldn’t have known any better.
The answer to the question that had plagued Callie for weeks—how will I feel when I see Jack?—hit her with the force of a hurricane.
She was furious.
BY THE TIME Jack climbed back into the Jaguar, the best rental car available from the airport in Memphis, nearly all the stores on Bicentennial Square had closed. This place was dead on the weekends, and only marginally breathing during the week. He glanced at his watch as he pulled out into the light Saturday traffic, and wondered what time it was in Oxford and whether he could call this afternoon to check up on his patients. Wondered what time the Marquette County courthouse opened on Monday.
How soon he could get a divorce.
Maybe he should, as the cute but moody florist had suggested, have bought flowers for her. His wife. Callista Jane Summers, according to the youthful scrawl on the marriage license application. But a bunch of yellow roses wouldn’t suffice to thank her.
He stopped at one of Parkvale’s dozen sets of traffic lights, then headed out of the square on treelined Main Street.
The elms, planted the year Jack was born, had grown taller in his absence. Yet the town itself had shrunk. It had always been too small, and now was Lilliputian. He’d no sooner started down Main when it was time to hang a left on Forsyth, and only seconds later, he was turning right into Stables Lane.
The narrow, dead-end avenue wasn’t much longer than a stone’s throw. A couple of cars were parked with two wheels on the sidewalk to allow passage. Jack pulled into his parents’ driveway, behind his father’s Ford Ranger pickup.
He left everything in the car except the flowers, wrapped in layers of lilac and green paper. The florist had told him what they were, but apart from the irises he’d forgotten. She’d done a nice job, that girl in the sexy blue tank. Jack had been surprised to learn from the guy at the gas station that Parkvale now boasted four florists. Eight years ago, he’d bought a corsage for his…bride…at the town’s sole flower shop, conveniently situated across the road from the hospital.
He gripped the flowers tighter, and steeled himself as he headed up the walk. For the overdue reunion with his parents. For the inevitable encounter with Callista Jane Summers.
Dealing with Callie would be the easy part, he reminded himself. She was a good kid, and fully aware of the favor he’d done her. And although her e-mails had come irritatingly close to nagging about the need for him to come home, she wanted the same thing as he did where their marriage was concerned.
Whereas his parents…It had been easier to stay away than get their hopes up about him coming back and “settling down.”
What was the bet that within half an hour he’d be fending off suggestions that he switch from neurosurgery to dermatology or geriatrics or something equally unlikely, and apply for a job in Parkvale?
His mother must have heard the car, because she showed up in the doorway, hopping from one foot to another like a kid of ten. “Jack!” Her delighted squeal gave him an unexpected lift. He took the porch steps in two strides, and grabbed her for a hug.
“You’re so tall, I can’t believe it.” Brenda squeezed him with the strength of a woman who’d had years of kneading her own bread dough.
“Cut it out, Mom. I’m no taller than I was when we caught up in New York last year.”
“I forgot then, too,” she said, unashamed.
“Maybe you’re getting shorter.” That earned him a swat on the back as he stepped over the threshold. He turned to hand her the flowers, which hadn’t suffered from being squashed in that hug.
“Jack, they’re gorgeous.” Brenda sniffed deeply at the bouquet, then sent him a sly smile. “I’ll bet I know where you got these.”
“The best florist in town,” he said easily.
His mom beamed. “Isn’t she just?”
Something about that beam, which smacked of personal pride, rang alarm bells in Jack’s head.
Then his mom said, “Everyone’s here to see you, sweetie. I put on a light lunch,” and he forgot about the florist.
“Everyone” meant a bunch of Mitchell relatives, and a “light lunch” meant a groaning buffet table, doubtless including his mother’s signature dish, Parkvale Curried Chicken Salad. He’d kind of missed Parkvale Curried Chicken Salad, which bore no resemblance to anything from India and had only a passing acquaintance with curry powder.
Brenda shepherded him into the living room of the Victorian house. High-ceilinged, deep-windowed, it at least was still the size he remembered. “He’s here,” she announced.
Uncle Frank and Aunt Nancy occupied the window seat. Their daughter, Sarah, held hands on the couch with a dark-haired man, and Jack vaguely recalled news of an engagement, plans for a June wedding. The two guys over by the bookcase must be Mark and Jason, Sarah’s older brothers. They’d both bulked up in eight years and Mark—or was it Jason?—had a serious facial hair thing going.
“Son,