“What’s wrong?”
“It’s an emergency.”
Worry spiked through him. “Where are you? Are you hurt?”
“Part of me is.”
His world began to spin. Today of all days was not the time for something bad to happen.
“Do I need to call Luke and Colleen? An ambulance?”
Laughter poured through the phone. “No! It’s my stomach. Someone needs to stop me from eating all these deep-fried heart-shaped brownies! Who decided to put them on sticks and serve them in little trays with caramel dipping sauce? A food sadist–whoever did this is a food sadist.”
A whooosh of relief shuddered through him, from mouth to toes. Joking. She was joking. The fact that he hadn’t read her tone was a sign of how rattled he really was. Reaching up, he stroked his beard, palm cupping his chin a few times with a slow, steady motion.
Why was he nervous? Was he afraid she would turn down his proposal?
No.
Yes.
No.
No!
Yes.
Kinda.
Maybe.
A little.
Okay. Fine.
Enough to be shaky, for sure.
“Wolf. That would be Wolf who made those brownies on a stick,” he said, knowing she expected him to say something. Wolf Mitteracht was one of the owners of Love You Bakery, known to the locals simply as Greta’s. Greta was Wolf’s mother, and she had opened the place decades ago.
“Then Wolf is personally responsible for two pounds going straight to my hips.”
“More to hold onto in bed. More cushion for – ,” he said, forgetting his mom was in the room.
Damn it.
“I didn’t hear that!” Deanna called out, wiping her hands on the kitchen towel next to the sink. She carefully avoided eye contact with Kell.
Ah. The worm had turned. How many times had Kell learned something more, ah… lascivious about his parents, and been embarrassed?
As time passed, the adult children were lapping the adult adults.
Rachel giggled. “Is Deanna there? I thought she’d be here at the festival. We need more sequined lips!”
Normally, Deanna would have been at the festival, in costume. Needed more by Kell to help usher Rachel’s family around, she was skipping her usual role this time.
For a very good cause.
A knock on the door made them both look. Portia’s face appeared, perfectly made up, with fire-engine red lips and impossibly long, minky eyelashes.
“Deanna? Is there a good cryotherapy center nearby? I found a spot of cellulite on my underarm and I need a treatment as soon as possible. I still don’t understand how the Inn we’re staying at doesn’t have a cryotherapy subwing, but I can’t bend reality.” She threw her hands up in the air and gave Kell’s mom a pleading look.
“Kell?” Rachel asked in a weird tone. “Did Deanna just say something about cryotherapy?”
“Um, yep.”
Portia stroked one perfectly manicured red fingernail along the ragged seam of the doorway, which needed trim and quarter round edging. Her nose wrinkled with disgust.
“And I haven’t seen anything like this since I guest starred on an HGTV show called – ”
Seeing his signal, Deanna raced to the door to get Portia out of his cabin, the door closing with a bang. For the last day, she’d been Portia, Stan and Tim’s unofficial tour guide, but a tour guide who had to hide them from their own daughter.
A daughter with a prominent business development role in town.
Gratitude for his mother rushed through him. She had become The Portia Whisperer, a logistics whiz and prima donna soother Kell admired.
“Why would she talk about cryo? Sounds more like something my mom would talk about.” Laughter filled his ear, but it didn’t make him smile.
“I think she was talking about, uh, crying in therapy.”
A gasp whistled in his ear. “Is something wrong? Is Deanna in therapy? What’s making her cry? Is there something I should know about?”
Every word out of his mouth made this all worse.
His hand moved to the zipper, playing with the top few inches. His mother was a miracle worker.
“No, Mom’s fine. She was just gossiping about someone else. Look, honey, we can chat on the phone or I can get down to the common and embarrass myself.”
“I can’t believe you entered the contest!”
Part of pulling off a monumental event like this as a surprise for Rachel meant giving her a little bit of the truth. He couldn’t very well live with the woman and practice singing “I Will Always Love You” without her becoming extremely suspicious–or thinking he’d gone off his rocker–so his cover story was that he’d entered the contest. Which was the truth.
Every year, the town of Love You, Maine, held loads of festivals, but this one was special. About two dozen different soloists and bands got up on stage for a rousing contest to see who could sing Dolly Parton’s famous song in the best way possible.
Or, if not the best, the most unique.
Kell wasn’t hoping to win. He was just trying to make sure Rachel knew how much he loved and cherished her, hoping a big public display of affection like this would cement her place in town as one of their own.
Small towns could be wonderfully welcoming, but only up to a point. Rachel’s start in their mountain hamlet had been rocky at best, hostile at worst. Being caught on a hot mic on the town common, spewing criticism about everything she thought was wrong with Luview, had not endeared her to the townspeople. That was two years ago, when she’d come into town to convince the local chocolatier to sell to an enormous chocolate conglomerate.
Love You Chocolates hadn’t sold out.
Yet Rachel had stayed.
Not only stayed, she’d left her corporate job with the big international chocolatier to become the town’s business development director, a position she absolutely adored. Every day, she had an explosion of new ideas to bring tourists to the town where love was a commodity, and then they fell in love with Luview.
Just like she had.
“Kell? Hello?”
Lost in his thoughts, he startled slightly.
“Oh. Right. I love you.”
“I love you, too. You okay?”
“Better than okay. And I’m on my way.”
“You’d better hurry. Your time slot is in ninety minutes.”
“I have plenty of time.”
“Parking isn’t great right now.”
“I know the town like the back of my hand, Rachel. I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t forget your guitar!”
And your engagement ring, he almost blurted out, the words close to the tip of his tongue. That would be one way to ruin the surprise.
Bad enough if she figured out her parents and brother were here. Even worse if he were the one to spoil his big surprise for her.
“See you soon. Stay beautiful.”
“You always say that.”
“Because it’s true.”
“What will you say when I’m old and saggy?”
“Same thing. Because your beauty is on the inside, not the outside.”
“You’re saying I’m ugly on the outside?”
“WHAT? No! I’m paying you a compliment.”
She made a huffing sound, but he could tell she was smiling.