A Gift For The Groom. Sally Carleen

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СКАЧАТЬ to come in just before dawn and shove in a few loaves of bread to bake. The sleepy owner they’d rousted out of bed had apologized for the fact that the air-conditioning was broken. Nick had his doubts that the place had ever possessed such a modern convenience.

      To make matters worse, he’d had no dinner the night before except the cookies Analise had given him. Every thought of the room’s being hot enough to bake bread, fry eggs, boil soup, had been related to food and had sent his stomach into growling frenzies.

      However, neither the heat nor his hunger had been the primary reason he’d tossed and turned all night, kicking the sheet into a twisted rope at the end of the lumpy bed.

      Analise had been the primary cause of his disquiet. Analise, who’d talked and snacked pretty much the entire trip, including the drive from the small airport to Prairieview in the rattletrap rental car his contact had left for him. She’d talked about her fiancé, his father, his mother, her mother, her father, her friends... She’d filled his plane with so many people, making them so real, he’d halfway expected them to walk out of the plane when they landed.

      By the time they arrived at the motel, the last two years of peace and tranquillity had disappeared without a trace and he was back in chaos. He’d grown up with four—count ’em, four—little sisters who’d kept the pandemonium at a consistently high level and regularly dived headfirst into situations from which he had to rescue them. Then, like a man possessed by masochism, when his twin sisters left for college, he’d married a ditzy woman who made his sisters seem staid and reasonable. His twin sisters had left three years ago and the ex-wife four months after he’d married her. Two years of serenity ... until last night. Until Analise.

      She was like his sisters and his ex-wife all put together then multiplied. And to make it worse, his hormones didn’t care. They would betray him, sell him down the river, send him into servitude just to have Analise. He wasn’t sure how it was possible, but while his brain told him to get away and save himself while he still could, his body wanted her with an intensity that threatened to overrule his brain.

      What little sleep he’d caught in fleeting snatches had been filled with dreams of Analise... Analise talking, eating, offering him candy, taking candy from his fingers with those soft, full lips-

      A knock on the door interrupted the thoughts Nick didn’t want to be having but couldn’t seem to stop. He untwisted the sheet from his ankle, retrieved his blue jeans from the worn carpet and went to answer the door.

      In the harsh glare of morning sunlight, Nick hallucinated a short, rounded angel with a wrinkled, cherubic face and a halo of snow-white curls. She wore a navy blue dress with white lace on the collar just like the one his grandmother had worn for church and funerals. She beamed up at him and shoved a large tray toward him. “Good morning, Mr. Claiborne. I brought you some breakfast.”

      He blinked a couple of times but the hallucination didn’t go away. In fact, his nose was getting in on. the act now, telling him the angel carried bacon, eggs and coffee on that tray.

      He stepped back, allowing the angel to enter his room. With any sort of luck, he could get a few bites of those eggs and a couple of sips of coffee before the hallucination vanished.

      “I’m Mabel Finch,” she said, shoving aside the lamp on the bedside table and setting down the tray. “My husband, Horace, and I own this place. Horace is the one who let you in last night.”

      She lifted the napkin, exposing a plate covered with crisply fried bacon, scrambled eggs, two delicately browned biscuits, a bowl of gravy and a large mug of coffee. Nick was positive then that she was an angel and he was in heaven. He must have died sometime during the night, probably a heart attack from one of those high-voltage dreams about Analise.

      “Th-Thank you,” he stammered. “This is great.” Mabel bustled across the room and opened the curtains then leaned back against the dresser, folding her arms across her ample bosom. “Analise wanted you to have a good breakfast. She said you didn’t eat anything last night except a handful of cookies.”

      Analise. He might have known. He drew his fingers over his stubbled jaw, needing to feel the slight prickle of reality. “How long have you known Analise?”

      “Since about seven this morning. Sit. Eat. You don’t want to be late for church.”

      “Church?” He plopped onto the edge of the bed. Damnedest motel he’d ever stayed in. Being served breakfast in his room by the motel owner was nice, but being sent to church was, he thought, a little pushy. However, it was a small price to pay for this kind of food.

      He unfolded the napkin, picked up the fork and began to eat.

      “Analise told us all about why you’re here, looking for that Abbie Prather person.”

      Nick broke open a flaky biscuit, poured gravy over it and crunched another piece of bacon. He wasn’t going to let Analise interfere with this unexpected feast. He wasn’t

      “Horace and I bought this place ten years ago from the Claxtons who sold out and moved to Arizona because he had arthritis and they’d heard the climate was better there. We’re from Wisconsin, so this climate seems better to us. It’s all relative, I guess. Anyway, we don’t know Abbie Prather or June Martin, but if she lives out away from everything and keeps to herself, we might not know her since we’ve only been here ten years. I told Analise that the ministers would be the ones to ask because they know everybody.”

      Like an embezzler would go to church, Nick thought, breaking open the second biscuit.

      “And sure enough, when Analise called Bob Sampson, who pastors the Freewill Baptist Church on Grand Avenue, he told her to come talk to him. Analise said she was sure you wouldn’t mind her borrowing your car and going over there so we wouldn’t have to wake you.”

      More gravy on that biscuit, Nick ordered himself Muffle everything this woman is saying with eggs and bacon. Drown it in coffee.

      But it was no use. She had his attention.

      Analise had borrowed his car? Since he had the only key, that must mean she’d practiced more of her questionable skills and hot-wired it.

      “She said to tell you that she’ll be back to get you during Sunday school so you can both go to the service at eleven,” Mabel continued, then shook her head slowly, the action not disturbing her tight curls. “I don’t believe the good Lord will mind if she wears those purple shorts to church, but we’re Methodists. I’m not so sure about those Baptists. I offered to loan her one of my dresses, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”

      Purple shorts?

      He laid down his fork, drained the cup of coffee and gave up.

      Before he was even out of bed, Analise had befriended the motel owners, procured breakfast for him, found a contact who remembered their missing party, stolen his car and gone to church in purple shorts.

      And he’d thought he was finished with taking care of, riding herd on and bailing out irresponsible, resourceful females.

      Not that his ex-wife, Kay, had ever sent his libido spiraling out of control the way Analise did.

      How the heck was he going to keep her out of trouble when he was in major trouble himself?

      

      Analise left the Reverend Robert Sampson’s house and headed СКАЧАТЬ