Lynna Banning - The Wedding Cake War

It was too late to retract the question. Say something simple, he urged her. Something short, using words of only one syllable.

The tip of her tongue slipped out to wet her lips and he heard a tiny sound. Oh, Lord, she had the hiccups.

Her mouth opened. “I think…” She closed her lips and frowned, and Kellen saw her throat tighten in another spasm.

“I think what interests me most about Ma-aple Falls is you, Colonel.”

Kellen blinked. “Me!”

“Precise-ly. What I find most intri-guing is why you would let the La-dies Helpful Society choose a wife for you. Oh, I understand about building the new sch-ool, but, to be honesht, uh honest, I would think—”

Kellen sent a desperate look toward the refreshment table. Do something!

Dora Mae nodded. “Question Two,” she stated in a piercing tone.

Thank God. Kellen wet his own lips and dug his notes out of his breast pocket. “Yes, well. Question Two is…what makes you happy? Miss Gundersen?”

Careen’s face lit up. “Oh, that’s easy, Colonel. I like solving things, like riddles. Or arithmetic problems. I like to figure things out.”

Another approving buzz circled around the hive.

“Miss LeClair?”

The pale eyelashes swooped down, then up. “Ah am happy when Ah can please others. Especially one particular Other, if you take my meanin’.”

Kellen unclenched his fingers. Meaning taken, yes. But believed? Not unless pigs flew south in the winter.

“Miss…” He caught himself just in time. Had the black swan had time to conquer her hiccups? He bent forward on the pretext of flicking a speck off his trouser leg and sent a surreptitious glance at Miss Mayfield.

She sat straight as a queen, her hands clasped in her lap—or what he could see of her lap under Miss Peacock’s voluminous skirt. And she was looking him straight in the eye. A challenge.

Ask me, her expression said. Get it over with.

“Miss Mayfield?”

“Flowers,” she blurted. “Flowers make me happy. Yellow ones. And sunsets and bread-baking smells and peach ice cream and running barefoot in long green grass and lovingsomeonelikeIlovedmyfather….” She paused for air. “There’s much more, but that’s all I can think of at the moment.”

So there, her gaze said.

Well-done. He congratulated her with a silent nod.

And just in time, too. Miss Mayfield’s eyelids were beginning to droop. The applejack had caught up with her.

“And now,” Dora Mae announced with a flourish, “the Last Question. Colonel?”

Kellen crumpled his notes in his fist and took a deep breath. The question he really wanted to ask wasn’t on his list. In fact he hadn’t thought of it until this moment.

He shouldn’t inquire about something so personal. But he had to know. He had to.

He took in a deep lungful of air and plunged. “The last question is, Why on earth are you interested in marrying me?”

All three women gaped at him.

Careen recovered first. “Every eligible female in this town would simply die to marry you, Colonel. Surely you don’t find that surprising?”

Miss LeClair responded as Kellen would have predicted. “Ah have heard on good authority that yoah a brave military officer and a Southern gentlemen. And that is exactly what Ah am lookin’ for.”

And his swan?

Miss Mayfield’s head nodded toward the yellow-silk-clad shoulder on her right.

“Miss Mayfield?” He sent her an urgent unspoken message. Wake up. Hoping the sound of his voice would rouse her, he repeated the question in a louder tone. “Why are you interested in marrying me?”

The blue eyes popped open. “Why? My gracious, I think that would be obvious. I don’t want to be an old maid!”

Laughter. Then the humming of animated conversation rose and eddied about the room; it sounded exactly like a hive of bees beginning to swarm. Kellen was too stunned to respond.

Squeezed between the settee arm and Fleurette’s voluminous skirts, Lolly decided she had to stand up. Either that or fall asleep right where she sat. Already her toes were numb and the tingly feeling was beginning to move up her calves toward her knees.

She tried to rise, but she couldn’t struggle past the enveloping mountain of yellow silk. “Ahem,” she murmured.

Fleurette chattered away without dropping a beat.

Lolly shifted her weight. “Excuse me,” she murmured. She tried to press down the puffs of skirt material.

No reaction. Fleurette’s voice drawled on. And on.

Lolly didn’t want to make a scene, but she had to get out of there. Now. She could feel the lace shawl pulling away from the top of her camisole; two more minutes and it would unwind completely and she would be sitting here in nothing but her camisole!

Clasping one hand to her bosom to hold things together, she poked the other under the yellow silk, aimed for solid flesh and pinched.

“Oo-ooooh!” Fleurette sprang to her feet. “Well, really,” she huffed. “Ah do declare…” Her voice trailed off when the colonel stepped forward.

“Is something wrong?”

Lolly flinched. Had he seen what she did?

“N-no,” Fleurette stammered. She sent Lolly a venomous look. “Ah guess Ah was mistaken.”

But from the glint of amusement in the colonel’s eyes, Lolly would wager he knew very well what she’d done.

Now that she was unencumbered, she would try again to stand up and make as polite an exit as she could manage, considering that her head felt light and kind of swirly. She would rock her weight forward and straighten to a standing position, despite her dizziness.

She commanded her knees to flex. Nothing happened.

She stiffened her spine. On the count of three, then.

“Leora?” Carrie peered at her from the other end of the green settee.

“One,” Lolly said.

“One what? Are you all right? You look…”

“Two,” Lolly muttered under her breath.

“Leora?” A hand stretched toward her.

Three.

She tried. She really tried. But ever so slowly, she began to tip sideways. Oh, mercy and botherment. Her cheek touched the velvet. My, it felt so good to close her eyes and…

The next thing she knew, someone—a man she guessed from his strength and his piney-musky scent—was lifting her upright. She opened her eyes to see Kellen Macready’s face much closer to hers than seemed proper.

“Oh, h’lo,” she murmured. “You smell good.”

Kellen’s voice vibrated against her ear. “Miss Mayfield, put your arms around my neck.”

“I would if I could,” she whispered. “But they have stopped working.”

“In that case…” He lifted her off the settee, rolled her against his chest and began moving.

“Oh, please,” she moaned. “Not sho fast. I feel like I’ve sprouted wings and I’ll fly right up to the ceiling.”

“You won’t,” he assured her.

“How do you know?”

This time an unmistakable laugh rumbled in his chest. “Gravity is on my side.”

His voice sounded near her temple. “Close your eyes, Miss Mayfield. And don’t talk.”

Lolly obeyed. Oh, but it felt lovely to be held in his arms. Her head pressed against his neck; the silk tie he wore tickled her chin. He did smell good. So good she wanted to lick his skin and taste it.

“Miss Mayfield has fainted, I believe.” His deep voice resonated against her ear.

Oh, no, I haven’t fainted, an inner voice reminded. I never faint. Even if I think I might die, I don’t faint. At this moment she might be floating with the angels near the ceiling, but she certainly had not lost reason or consciousness.

Voices ebbed and sighed around her. One in particular cut through the woolly-bear feeling in her brain. “Well, Ah never…”