The Bridesmaid's Gifts Read online

Something changed in his expression, irritation replaced instantly by reluctant concern. His hand tightened around her arm. “Aislinn? Damn it, you’ve gone white as a sheet. What’s going on?”

  “I—uh—”

  “Aislinn?” Nic appeared suddenly at her other side, looking quickly from Aislinn to Ethan. “Is anything wrong?”

  “I—” Abruptly brought back to the present, she looked around, relieved to see that no one else seemed to be looking at them. Not at the moment, anyway. “I think I need some fresh air. If you’ll excuse me…”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  Aislinn forced a smile for her friend and spoke brusquely. “You’ll do no such thing. This is your wedding reception. Go find your groom and dance again. I just need a couple of minutes alone. You know how I am when a lot of people are around.”

  Because she did know, Nic backed off. “All right. Let me know if you need anything.”

  “I will.”

  Without looking at Ethan again, Aislinn made her escape, wishing she could go straight home but knowing she had to stay a while longer yet. For Nic.

  Ethan woke early Sunday morning with that sense of disorientation that usually accompanied waking in a strange bed. It took him only a moment to remind himself that he was in his brother’s guest room, the only occupant of the house since Joel and Nic had left after the reception for a weeklong Caribbean honeymoon—the longest either of them could take away from their demanding careers. Ethan would stay here until they returned, at which time—assuming everything at Joel’s office was running smoothly—he would head back to Alabama.

  Joel had invited his parents to stay at the house, too, but they had chosen to stay in a nearby hotel instead, planning an early departure this morning. Their father was eager to get back to his routines. It was going to take a lot of persuasion for Elaine to get him away for that European vacation she longed for, Ethan thought with a shake of his head. Lou Brannon was the very epitome of a contented homebody. Something Ethan understood a bit too well.

  Glancing at the clock on the nightstand, he saw that it was just after seven. Yet he’d bet his parents were already on the road. His dad liked to get an early start.

  So here he was, the only member of his family in a town where he hardly knew anyone. During the five days he had been here, he’d spent several hours at Joel’s clinic, meeting the partner and staff, looking over the operations with an eye toward streamlining bookkeeping and maximizing profits. Joel and Bob were literally putting their business into his hands.

  He and their newly hired office manager, Marilyn Henderson, would meet with several software salespeople during the next week, as well as have long discussions about existing office practices. They would pore over the books and filing systems, deciding what to change and what to leave alone—though there would be very little of the latter.

  Joel and Bob were great guys and excellent doctors, but neither of them had paid much attention to the business part of the practice they had opened just under two years earlier. They could definitely use some help in that area, and Ethan already had a plan in mind. Fortunately Marilyn seemed to be in agreement about the way a pleasant yet efficient medical office should be managed.

  Since he was alone in the house, he pulled on a pair of jeans and zipped them but left the snap undone. Barefoot and shirtless, he wandered into the kitchen, yawning and wondering what Joel had left for breakfast. He found orange juice in the refrigerator and poured himself a glass, then popped a bagel into the toaster. Only then did he admit that from the moment he’d opened his eyes he had been trying without success to forget about Aislinn Flaherty.

  He had every intention of avoiding her for the remainder of his stay in Cabot. Shouldn’t be too hard. He doubted that she would visit the pediatric practice. And he wouldn’t be ordering any cakes.

  He’d given up trying to decide if she was crooked or crazy, but her comment about his mother’s upcoming medical tests had made a cold chill go down his spine. He’d known for a fact that no one knew about those tests except his parents and himself. Just to confirm, he’d casually asked his mother afterward if she had mentioned the situation to anyone else. Anyone at all.

  She had reminded him that she wanted to keep the tests absolutely secret until after she learned the results. She had been especially adamant that Joel was not to be told until after his honeymoon.

  So how had Aislinn known?

  He knew that so-called psychic con artists performed what were known as cold readings—throwing out vague comments and then watching carefully for the most minute changes in expression and subtle body language from their gullible marks. But as far as he’d been able to tell, Aislinn hadn’t prefaced her remarks about his mother’s health with anything he would have considered fishing for clues. And she hadn’t spent much time talking alone to either of his parents, so he kept coming back to the same question….

  How had she known?

  Not that he had changed his mind about her alleged abilities. Guess or guile, she hadn’t just pulled that prediction out of the ether. And while he fervently hoped she was right about the tests resulting in good news, he would consider it no more than a happy coincidence if it turned out to be true.

  Just as well he wouldn’t be seeing her again anytime soon, he told himself as he finished his breakfast. He was just too uncomfortable around her, for quite a few reasons.

  Someone rang the front doorbell, startling him as he set his dishes in the dishwasher. He pushed a hand through his tousled hair and moved toward the front door. He couldn’t imagine who would be at Joel’s door on a Sunday morning when everyone knew Joel was out of town. Maybe his parents hadn’t gotten that early start after all.

  Having no psychic abilities of his own, he was surprised to find Aislinn on the other side of the door. She wore a gray T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, her dark hair pulled into a loose ponytail, no evidence of makeup on her striking face. She looked as though she had crawled out of bed, thrown on the first clothes she’d found and driven straight over. “What are you doing here?”

  She didn’t appear to take offense at the blunt greeting. “I need to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  She sighed. “May I come inside?”

  For only a moment, he hesitated, tempted to close the door in her face. He finally stepped aside, not because he didn’t want to be rude but because he didn’t want to think of himself as a coward.

  “Okay,” he said, facing her from several feet away, his arms crossed over his bare chest. “What is it? Another ‘prediction’?”

  She looked around the room, her expression distracted, and then she turned and moved toward the hallway. Frowning, Ethan dropped his arms and followed her. “Where are you going?”

  Without answering, she turned left, into Joel’s bedroom rather than into the guest room on the right where Ethan had been staying.

  “Aislinn, what the hell are you—”

  “There’s a photograph,” she said vaguely. “I need to—oh, here it is.”

  The small, framed photo sat on top of a bookcase in one corner. The paperback mysteries Joel liked to read to relax at bedtime filled the bookcase almost to overflowing. On the wall above hung a framed watercolor painting of a peaceful lake cove surrounded by trees and boulders. Joel was the artist; until Nic had told him a few months earlier, Ethan hadn’t even known Joel liked painting with watercolors.

  “You sure know your way around Joel’s house,” he muttered as Aislinn picked up the photograph.

  “I’ve never been inside this house before,” she replied absently. “We’ve always gathered at Nic’s instead.”

  So how had she…? Shaking his head impatiently, he told himself that he had no way of judging if she was even telling the truth. “Okay, what’s going on?”

  She drew a deep breath and looked at him. He noted abruptly that she still looked as oddly pale as she had when they’d parted last night. Perhaps that was why it was no surprise when she warned,
“You aren’t going to like this.”

  He was pretty sure that would prove to be an understatement.

  Aislinn had been too focused on finding the photograph to pay much more than passing attention to Ethan when he’d let her in. She’d managed maybe two hours of sleep last night before she had finally given in to the overwhelming urge to drive to Joel’s house. She’d waited as long as she could, doubting that Ethan would appreciate being awakened before dawn so she could find a photograph that was haunting her. Not that he’d been overjoyed to see her as it was.

  Only now did she really look at him. He, too, seemed to have only recently crawled out of bed. His hair was mussed, he hadn’t shaved and he wasn’t wearing a shirt or shoes. His jeans weren’t snapped. A stark contrast to the tidy and tuxedoed groomsman she had seen the evening before, she thought.

  She wondered if it was weird that she thought he looked even better like this than he had at the wedding. More natural. This was the real Ethan—and despite his forbidding expression, he was a very attractive man.

  Pulling her gaze away from the well-defined muscles of his lean chest and abdomen, she moistened her dry lips, her fingers tightening around the small silver frame clutched in her hands. She wasn’t exactly sure how to begin, since she already knew he wasn’t going to believe a word she said.

  “Well?” he prompted impatiently.

  Might as well stop stalling. She turned the photo toward him. “You recognize this picture, of course.”

  He glanced at it, then shrugged. “It’s my family, obviously. Some thirty years ago.”

  “Your father. Your mother. You.” She pointed to each figure as she named them. Ethan was perhaps six in the photograph, maybe seven. She indicated the younger boy next to him. “And this is Joel.”

  Ethan nodded, a muscle clenching in his jaw as they both turned their attention to the baby sitting in Elaine’s lap.

  “Who is this?”

  For just a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. And then he muttered, “That’s Kyle. I assume you already know he died when he was almost two.”

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  He crossed his arms over his chest, making the muscles bulge just a little. If he was trying to look intimidating, he succeeded. Of course, he also looked sexy as all get-out, but she couldn’t think about that right now.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Please, Ethan. Just humor me for a few minutes. I know this must be difficult for you.”

  “It happened a long time ago,” he said with a slight shrug. “I hardly remember him.”

  It took no special ability at all for her to know that he was lying. She looked at him without responding.

  After a moment he shook his head and spoke curtly. “He drowned. It happened during the aftermath of a tropical storm. There had been a lot of flooding, a lot of local destruction, and even though the weather was still bad, Mom had gone out with one of her charity groups to try to help some of the people who had suffered the most damage to their homes. Dad was at his office, making sure everything there was okay. They left Joel with the nanny who took care of us while Mom was busy with her volunteer work, which was pretty often back then.”

  “And there was an accident?”

  He nodded. “Joel and I were spending the week with our maternal grandparents in Tennessee, as we did every summer while they were living. Mom thought Kyle was still too small to be gone for that long. Anyway, for some reason, the nanny took him out during that heavy rain. No one knows why they left the house. They were in her car, a cheapie little compact.”

  He cleared his throat, then continued, “Apparently she hydroplaned, went off the road and was swept into a flooding river. The car was found a few days later, overturned in very deep water, but it was empty. Several other people drowned during that same tropical storm and resulting flood. There was another man whose body wasn’t recovered for several months, but neither the nanny’s body nor my brother’s was ever found.”

  There was no identifiable emotion in his tone, though his eyes looked darker than usual. He obviously believed every word of the sad story he had just told her. The story that had been told to him.

  She moistened her lips again. “It isn’t true,” she whispered.

  He frowned more deeply at her. “What isn’t true?”

  “Any of it. I mean, I know that’s what you think happened. What you all believe. But…”

  Ethan’s arms dropped to his sides, the fists clenched. He took a step toward her, making her instinctively move backward. “If you’re going to try to feed me a load of crap about how you’ve been talking to my dead brother…”

  “No!” She shook her head forcefully. “It’s not like that, Ethan. I’m not a medium. And even if I were, it wouldn’t apply in this case.”

  “And just what is that supposed to mean?”

  She drew a deep breath, then blurted out the words before she could lose her nerve. “Kyle isn’t dead.”

  Chapter Four

  A gentle breeze ruffled Cassandra’s snow-white hair, one straight lock tickling her right cheek. She reached up to tuck it back, savoring the scent of the flowers that bloomed in the gardens around her.

  As she often did, she thought of how fortunate she was to be at this pleasant, exclusive, private facility. It was expensive, but her late husband had made sure she would be well cared for after his passing. Just as she had known he would when she’d married him.

  She sat alone in her little corner of the garden. She didn’t mingle much with the other residents here, most of them being quite a bit older. Besides, she wasn’t interested in socializing. She actually enjoyed her solitude, for the most part.

  She didn’t come outside very often, but she had allowed herself to be persuaded this afternoon, thinking that the fresh, warm air might clear her mind. She didn’t like the new medications. They left her feeling groggy. Lethargic. And she still had the nightmares. Not as often, maybe, but just as vivid and disturbing when they came.

  She would have to ask Dr. Thomas to make another adjustment.

  Her knitting needles clicked with a slower-than-usual rhythm as she tried to immerse herself in the soothing sounds of the birds singing in the trees above her head, the water splashing gently in the nearby fountain. Lovely, peaceful sounds that almost—but not quite—drowned out the echoes of her dreams.

  “Here you are.”

  She couldn’t have said how much time had passed between her thoughts of him and his appearance. A few minutes. An hour, perhaps. Time had a trick of slipping away from her. “Hello, Dr. Thomas.”

  He sat on a concrete garden bench, crossing one leg over the other. The casual pose stretched the fabric of the khaki slacks he almost always wore with a solid-color shirt and brightly patterned tie beneath the required white coat that made him look so handsome and professional. She liked the way he dressed. Not too stuffy but neatly enough to show regard for his patients here.

  There had been a trend away from ties and white coats a couple of years ago, but the residents hadn’t liked seeing their physicians in blue jeans and polo shirts and other members of the staff in T-shirts and flip-flops. Now that the doctors were back in their white coats and the rest of the staff wore tidy uniforms, everything seemed to run much more smoothly. More civilly. She firmly believed that the general decline in polite society could be measured by the pervasive loss of respect for proper attire.

  And weren’t there people in her past who would find that attitude hilarious, coming from her?

  “What are you thinking about so seriously?”

  She made herself smile as she replied candidly, “Neckties and panty hose.”

  To give him credit, he didn’t seem at all taken aback by the non sequitur, asking merely, “Are you for ’em or agin ’em?”

  She chuckled, thinking of how much she liked this nice young man. “I’m for ’em.”

  He tugged lightly at the blue-and-green-patterned tie he wore with
a blue shirt that contrasted nicely with his light tan. “I was afraid you might say that.”

  Laughing again, she shook her head. “Don’t try to con me. You like looking nice or you wouldn’t give so much thought to matching your shirts and ties. Unlike some of the doctors who show up in mismatched patterns and colors that make one’s head hurt to look at them.”

  “Now, Cassandra, don’t make fun of Dr. Marvin. Everyone knows he’s color-blind.”

  “Then he should always let his wife dress him in the mornings, bless his heart.”

  Grinning, the doctor nodded. “You’re probably right. So how are you?”

  She told him about the effects of the new sleep aid, finishing with a request for a change.

  Dr. Thomas nodded gravely. “We’ll make another adjustment. I still think it would be good for you to talk about your dreams with someone, though. If not with me, at least with your counselor. We don’t discuss specifics about our clients, as you’re aware, but I get the feeling you aren’t being much more forthcoming with her than you are with me.”

  “I tell you both everything you need to know,” she assured him, catching a dropped stitch.

  “I would like to think you trust me, Cassandra.”

  The sincerity in his voice was genuine, not like some of the doctors who only pretended to be truly concerned about the residents here. Dr. Thomas cared so much that she was tempted at times to advise him to put a bit more distance between himself and his patients. As appealing as his empathetic nature made him, it also made him more susceptible to burnout and disillusion. As fond as she was of him, she would hate to see him fall prey to either of those conditions.

  “I trust you as much as I trust anyone.”

  He sighed lightly. “I suppose I have to be satisfied with that.”

  Nodding, she let her hands rest. “How was your date last week?”

  “We were talking about you, not me.”

  She lifted her needles again.

  After a moment, he conceded. “We attended a symphony performance. We had a flat tire on the way to the concert hall, but I was able to change it without messing up my clothes or making us late to the concert. On the whole, it was a pleasant evening.”