Sealed with a promise (15 page)

  Vicky examined her handiwork. “Okay,” she nodded. “You can call me if you need me.” She backed out of the stall and even pulled the door closed behind her, although, of course, it couldn’t be latched. “I won’t let anybody walk in on you,” she promised earnestly.

  Emmie sat on the toilet for a minute when she was done, conscious of a relief not wholly due to having eased the pressure on her bladder. And it wasn’t only that she, at last, had a moment alone with her thoughts. It was something else, like a problem or a weight had disappeared, but she couldn’t classify whatever it was.

  “Now we need to reverse the process,” she told Vicky as she exited the stall, the skirt of the dress still bunched around her waist. She probably could have pushed it down herself, and almost had, until she thought that Vicky might like to see her job to completion. As soon as she said it, she knew she had guessed right. Vicky knelt in front of her. With her golden freckled face a study in grave concentration, she drew the hem back to its proper position.

  Vicky smoothed reverent, gold-dotted fingers over the bronze taffeta and rose. “I don’t think we wrinkled it much.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Emmie went to the lavatory and waved a hand over the sensor to start the water flow. She caught Vicky’s eye in the mirror. Vicky sat once again in the large wingback chair where she had been when Emmie came in. Her head leaned against one of the wings as she watched Emmie. “Vicky, everyone else is sitting down to dinner. What were you doing in here when I came in?”

  “I got tired of playing with the other kids. All they wanted to do was run back and forth between the kids’ room and the big people’s room.”

  It didn’t square with Vicky’s earlier announcement that she liked to be where the action was. Emmie wondered if something had happened to make Vicky want to avoid the other children. Before she could ask, the door sighed open, and Grace, her heels tapping lightly on the tile floor, entered.

  The evening gown Grace wore was of some filmy material coaxed to drape in a waterfall of pleats through the bodice and float around her ankles where tiny crystals sewn into the hem added an elusive glisten. Emmie had never given a great deal of thought to what made a dress look as it did. Now she was struck by how much more mature Grace’s gown looked. Not like an old-lady dress, but still, vastly more sophisticated than hers. This evening she was noticing nuances of dress she had formerly been blind to-no, not blind to, willfully ignorant about.

  “Oh, good,” Grace said when she saw Vicky. “I’ve found both of you. Vicky, your mother is looking for you. Run on now. She was alarmed that you weren’t with the other children.”

  Behind Grace’s back, Vicky flicked her fingers in a secret wave as she disappeared out the door.

  Grace laid her evening bag on the counter and turned her attention to Emmie. She whipped tiny boxes, brushes, and tubes from her purse, and filled a paper cup with water, saying it wouldn’t take more than a minute to fix Emmie up. Emmie didn’t put up one word of protest.

  Careful not to stare from the dais where he sat at the bridal party table, Do-Lord kept the wavy white hair of his quarry in his peripheral vision. It wasn’t as easy as it should have been. Not with Emmie right here beside him. He had kissed her on the cheek and told her to “go get beautiful,” but he hadn’t expected her to do it.

  Do- Lord had never put a great deal of thought into what made a girl pretty. They either were or they weren’t, and in his experience, most were. His challenge was to find one he thought was interesting.

  From the first, his attention had locked in on Emmie like a heat-seeking missile, despite her general frumpiness. Now, no matter how hard he tried to track Calhoun’s progress as he worked the room, Do-Lord’s eyes didn’t want to cooperate. They constantly drifted back to Emmie, transformed almost past recognition. The shimmery bronze material of her strapless dress traced her every curve and fascinated him by changing color subtly every time she crossed her legs or shifted in her chair. Shit, every time she
breathed.

  As servers removed the dinner plates, the well-bred din of several hundred guests increased.

  “Change places with me,” Emmie whispered urgently. “I need to talk to Pickett.”

  “Everything okay?” Do-Lord rose and helped with her chair.

  “Yes, well, no. I forgot to tell her where to cut the cake.”

  Emmie put the cool, milky whiteness of her cheek, which glowed with only a hint of rose, next to Pickett’s warm, peachy one. They looked like moonlight and sunlight whispering together. As she listened to her friend, Pickett’s eyes rested on him speculatively. By the time Emmie got to the end of her recital, Pickett was laughing. She tugged on Jax’s sleeve to get his attention. With a smile, he leaned closer.

  Do- Lord put his arm on the back of Emmie’s chair and leaned over her shoulder to hear what they were saying. His body’s relationship to Emmie’s exactly mirrored Jax’s
vis-a-vis
Pickett. Jax’s light-colored eyes narrowed. In the wordless communication he and Jax had perfected over the years, he read that Jax noticed the same thing.

  The body language of both men said
this
woman is mine.

  Jax’s eyes narrowed a bit more. Emmie was (a) female and (b) Pickett’s friend. Alpha male to the core, that made her Jax’s to protect from any male’s encroachment.

  Do- Lord met Jax’s eye in direct challenge. Emmie would be offended to her liberated core if she had any idea Jax thought he had the right to give her to someone. She’d be even more upset if she knew he was offering Jax a fight, if he wanted it, because he intended to claim her for himself.

  One eyebrow lifted, he grinned a grin that said,
What’s it gonna be?
until with a tiny smile Jax ceded Emmie to him.

  From now on, the lines of territoriality would be drawn with a subtle difference. Jax would still defend Emmie, but he would be defending Do-Lord’s territory rather than his own.

  “Whose idea was it to switch the cakes?” Jax asked now, a slow smile taking over his face.

  “Emmie’s. I just carried out orders.”

  “Huh!” Emmie objected. “He did a complete save, that’s all. And Grace will never find out.”

  Jax stood a table knife on its end, ran his fingers down it, flipped it. Did it again. “Oh, Grace will know.”

  At the sudden grimness in his tone, Pickett squeezed his hand. “Jax. Let it go. It doesn’t matter.”

  Pickett accepted the tender smile and the reassurances Jax gave her at face value. Do-Lord knew better. SEALs believed in accountability. Grace was going to find out that from now on there would be consequences, swift and painful, anytime she didn’t treat Pickett with care. And if she didn’t demonstrate she could be trusted, Jax would see to it that she never came near Pickett again.

  Somewhere in this room was a man who had avoided the consequences of his dereliction for fifteen years, insulated by money and power. Do-Lord skimmed his hand across the cool silk of Emmie’s shoulder. He traced his finger over the little point where her collarbone ended.

  Fate had put in his hands the means to penetrate the layers with which men like Calhoun guarded themselves-the layers which had once defeated him. Do-Lord felt a new surge of satisfaction. When the time came, Calhoun would know exactly who was holding him accountable, and for what.

  At his touch Emmie turned toward him, a small inquiring tilt to her lips, the pupils of her wide summer- sky eyes huge-an autonomic nervous system sign of interest over which she had no control.

  She also ran her fingertips through the ends of her hair, calling attention to its silky shimmer, and tilted her head toward him. Do-Lord could hardly believe it. Those were the very behaviors he’d noted this afternoon that she
never
did. Tonight she looked like a different woman. Her eyes looked larger and more tilted at their outer corners, and the strapless dress revealed a form that would stop traffic.

  She was ready to move to the next stage.

  His scrotum tightened. This was going to be good.

  She took a sip of her champagne and smiled at him over the rim of her glass in shy invitation. Nothing improved a man’s mood like the prospect of getting laid, but the updraft of sexual anticipation he’d been riding suddenly died. She not only looked different tonight, she was acting different. He looked again at her eyes. Not only were the pupils large, they looked bleary and unfocused. Her gestures were larger, and she smiled more frequently.

  “What kind of drugs are you doing?”

  There was a small, but significant, lag as she processed his question. The first thing he’d noticed about her was how quick she was.

  “No drugs,” she denied. “Except for the anti-inflammatory.”

  “Don’t lie to me.” Cold disgust filled him. To think he’d been taken in by her air of primal innocence. “You’re on something.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are,” Pickett contradicted, overhearing their exchange. “You took Vicodin too.”

  “No, I
didn’t
,” Emmie objected. “It makes me”-she waved her hand helplessly-“strange.”

  “Oops.” Pickett made a Charlie Brown chagrin-face. “I’m sorry, but you did take it. I gave it to you when Trish was cutting your hair. It should have worn off by now though-that was hours ago.” Pickett eyed her friend more closely. “You are acting kind of smashed. How much champagne have you had?”

  Emmie ignored the question. “If you gave it to me
then,
what did Grace give me?”

  “Grace gave you something?”

  Emmie nodded. “When I went to the ladies’ room. She fixed my makeup and gave me my medicine.”

  Pickett leaned past Jax to tap Grace’s shoulder. “Did you give Emmie her medicine?”

  “Yes. I brought it with me because I knew she wouldn’t remember it.
You
didn’t need to try to keep up with it. I intended to give it to her when we sat down to eat since she’s supposed to take it with food. But I found her in the ladies’ room, so I went ahead and gave it to her. Is there a problem?”

  Do- Lord caught Davy’s eye, and in a minute he excused himself from the well-endowed young lady he was charming. He dropped to a squat beside Do-Lord’s chair. “What’s up?”

  With Grace and Pickett chiming in, Do-Lord explained the sequence of events and their concern about Emmie.

  Davy grinned when he heard the story. “I think I know what happened. She was fine during the wedding, right? Then she had a couple of glasses of champagne, but she was still fine because the first dose was wearing off. Then Grace gave her more Vicodin, and it combined with the alcohol already in her system, and
voila,
snockered.”

  “I never thought to warn her not to drink. Emmie
doesn’t
drink.” Grace threw up her hands. “You’ve been drinking on top of taking pain pills. Emmie, don’t you know anything?”

  Emmie thought the question over carefully. “I know the periodic table of elements,” she announced solemnly. “I know how to conjugate all tenses of all English verbs and many Latin ones. I know how to calculate a chi square distribution. And,” she added with the superior smile of someone clinching an argument, “I know I like champagne.”

  They were still kind of unfocused-looking, but Do-Lord thought he caught a mischievous gleam in Emmie’s oh-so-innocent eyes that said she was more sober than she appeared and was playing to her audience. She confirmed his hypothesis by grinning outright when everyone laughed. He had several times today relished her dry, slightly subversive wit delivered with bland innocence. He’d bet people who weren’t quick on the uptake thought she didn’t have a sense of humor.

  Davy slapped his thighs and stood up. “I don’t think she needs medical attention. If more than one person manages her meds, get one of those pill-minders to keep from accidentally overdosing. In the meantime, I wouldn’t worry. You’re not going to let her drive, and she’s not operating heavy machinery.” He gave Emmie a warning look. “I’d go easy on the champagne, though. You’re sucking that stuff down.”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  “The codeine in the Vicodin dries up secretions and makes your mouth feel dry, but alcohol itself is dehydrating. The more you drink, the thirstier you’ll feel.”

  “You’re cut off.” Do-Lord lifted the champagne glass from her hand. He thanked Davy with a nod. He helped Emmie to her feet and aimed her toward the non-alcoholic drink table, where an ornate silver punch bowl, big enough to bathe in, lent dignity to the choice not to imbibe in spirits. He guided her wobbling steps with an arm around her waist. “Walk straight,” he whispered, trying not to laugh. “You’re not that high.”

  The relief he felt was way out of proportion, and he knew it. He had no moralistic aversion to drugs or those who used them. Where he came from drugs had been a fact of life and dealing the surest source of money, although he’d never dealt himself. He’d watched his mother drift into a fog of drugs that did a better job of supporting her fantasies than the real world did. He’d steered clear of drugs because
someone
had to be responsible, someone had to foresee consequences. The penalties for possession were severe, and even from a young age he’d realized no one would look after his mother if he wasn’t there.

  He’d land like a Humvee dropped from a transport helo on anyone under him who showed signs of using. SEALs had to be able to trust one another, and there was no trusting someone on drugs. As for the rest of the world-he didn’t have to trust the rest of the world. Drugs existed, and people used them. But he didn’t want Emmie to use. When he’d recognized the symptoms of being stoned, something within him had howled with a total-body fury that had left him momentarily weak.

  “Drink this.” He handed her some of the fruity mixture dipped from the ornate silver punch bowl.