relief. She moved away from the desk as if the floor had suddenly caught on fire and she was barefoot.
“You act as though you didn’t expect me to come back,” Alex remarked, amused.
Now that Alex had returned, Dorothy could be a little magnanimous. “Of course I did. It’s just that those were the longest twenty minutes I’ve ever spent.”
“Don’t understand how,” Alex commented, “seeing as I was only gone for fifteen. And I would have been back sooner, but Cris just kept talking and talking.” She slanted a sideways glance at her sister, then added with a completely straight face, “Didn’t seem right, cutting her off and walking away just like that.”
“No, of course not,” Dorothy agreed solemnly. “I wouldn’t have expected you to.”
“She’s pulling your leg, Dorothy,” Cris said. There was never any winning with Alex. “You are impossible. I should start composing my letter of condolence to Wyatt now. Better yet, I should tell him to run for the hills while he still can.”
“Don’t you dare,” Stevi warned, entering with Cris’s five-year-old son in tow. “You do anything to mess up this wedding I’ve been working so hard on and I swear, it’ll be the last thing you ever do.” Stevi’s eyes narrowed as her threat became more menacing. “Alex and Wyatt are getting married Christmas Day if I have to hog-tie both of them and pull them up to the altar in a horse-drawn cart.”
“Nothing weird about that statement.” Alex laughed, shaking her head. “Maybe I should elope.”
“You do and I’ll hunt you both down and make you pay dearly for my pain and suffering,” Stevi warned.
Threatening vibes were all but wafting from Stevi’s five-six form. “You do realize,” Alex said, “that you’re just organizing a small wedding reception and not staging the second invasion of Normandy or a military coup in a third-world country, right?”
“What I realize,” Stevi responded, “is that you have no concept of what’s involved in carrying off a successful reception.”
Alex extended a sympathetic smile and an offer she knew would be refused. “If it’s too much for you, Stevi, I’ll gladly relieve you of the responsibility.”
Stevi’s blue eyes widened with complete surprise. “You wouldn’t dare,” she breathed.
Alex chuckled as she shook her head. “I can’t decide if you just uttered a frantic plea or tossed out a challenge without remembering to throw down the symbolic glove.”
Stevi blew out a breath, doing her best to rein herself in. “Okay, maybe I am being a little intense,” she allowed.
Alex’s eyes met Stevi’s, pinning her where she stood. “Maybe?”
Stevi relented. “Okay, I am being a little intense—”
“Only in the sense that World War II was a ‘little’ conflict. Stevi, I love you, but get a grip. This is just supposed to be a small gathering.”
“There’s nothing small about three hundred people in my book.”
“What three hundred people?” Alex inquired incredulously. Her list had under a hundred people on it. Well under a hundred. “Are you throwing the doors open to the general population?”
“No,” Stevi insisted. “I’m just counting Wyatt’s list.”
“Wyatt’s got over two hundred people coming?” she asked.
“That’s how many names are on his final list.” Stevi nodded. “Wyatt pared it down from five hundred,” she added. “He didn’t want you to be overwhelmed.”
“Too late,” Alex retorted.
“How could you and Wyatt not have discussed the invite list?” Cris asked her in disbelief.
“Well, I...just assumed he was...leaving this to me...” Alex trailed off. “His work has kept him away from the inn a lot. Say, Stevi, when did he have time to—”
“Now, Miss Alex,” Dorothy interrupted loyally. “You only get married for the first time once.”
“Wyatt knows I don’t want the wedding to get out of hand or come off like a three-ring circus. It’s supposed to be more or less an intimate gathering. Why is he inviting the immediate world? I want to see the list, Stevi.”
“I don’t have it with me,” her sister protested. “I went to pick up Ricky, remember?”
“I can wait,” Alex said matter-of-factly, indicating that she expected her to retrieve the list—now.
Stevi lifted her chin. “You don’t believe me? Or is it Wyatt you’re asking me to check up on?”
“Yes” was Alex’s answer. “Now go get the list.”
CHAPTER TWO
“MAMA.”
Cris looked down at her son. Throughout the discussion about the guest list, Ricky had been trying to get her attention by pulling on the apron that had become practically a part of every outfit she put on.
As resident chef, she spent most of her time preparing her kitchen, preparing her menu or preparing the meals themselves for the ever-changing array of guests, who came as much for the meals as they did for the inn’s charm, service and beautiful view.
Impatience vibrated in her five-year-old’s plaintive cry.
“What is it, little man?” Cris asked, placing her hands on his slight shoulders.
“I want to show you something,” Ricky told her with enthusiasm on the brink of exploding.
Though he was clearly bursting to share whatever it was, Cris knew that her son liked being coaxed. So she played along and asked, “What is it, Ricky?”
“I drewed you a picture,” he said proudly as he began digging into his bright blue-and-white backpack with its cheerful cartoon character logo—a gift from Dorothy on his first day of school.
“Drew,” Cris automatically corrected. “You drew a picture.”
Ricky spared her a glance as if he didn’t see what the problem was. “That’s what I said,” he insisted. “I drewed you a picture. Teacher told us to make one of our family.”
Cris opened her mouth to try to make the five-year-old understand the difference between the word he used and the word he was supposed to use, but decided to temporarily suspend the grammar lesson when she saw the picture he’d “drewed.”
At times, she still couldn’t help marveling that she was his mother. She certainly felt less than qualified for the position. Her own image of a mother—based on what she remembered of her mother—was that of unshakable wisdom mixed with love and understanding. While she had more than endless amounts of love to shower on the boy and she thought of herself as an understanding person, she felt sorely lacking in the unshakable wisdom department.
Every
