Her head started throbbing, so she turned to grab a soda out of the mini-fridge. She’d just laid her hand on the neck of the last bottle when the Styrofoam carryout box caught her eye. Major’s bold scrawl across the top of it sent chill bumps down the back of her neck:
Meredith—sorry I keep missing you. Hope you enjoy. I think this is one of your favorite meals.
M O’H
A raft of tears flooded her eyes, but she blinked hard to make them go away. She jumped when her cell phone buzzed against her waist and began trilling her general ringtone. An unfamiliar number scrolled across the screen.
With a deep breath, followed by clearing her throat, she clicked the appropriate button and pressed the device to her ear. “This is Meredith Guidry.”
“Well, hello there, Meredith Guidry,” came a deep voice. “This is Ward Breaux. You didn’t answer the e-mail I sent earlier in the week, so I figured I’d give you a call.”
Yeah, she’d been meaning to get around to reading that e-mail. “Hey, Ward. I guess you want to talk about my house, huh?”
“That wasn’t my primary reason for calling, no.” The humor that filled his voice conjured an image of him towering over her, giving her that grin and looking at her with flirtatious eyes. “I was hoping I could take you out for dinner tonight.”
“Tonight?” Thursday. Dinner with the other unmarried adult cousins and siblings. “I can’t tonight. I already have plans.”
“Tomorrow then.”
She pulled the phone away, stared at it in astonishment, and put it back to her ear. “Hold on. Let me check my calendar.” She already knew what it would show her. No event tomorrow night that she needed to be at—the event planners were doing that—which meant that her Friday night might include going upstairs to watch a movie with Anne and George if they weren’t going out.
“Am I freaking you out by moving too fast?” Ward’s voice tingled on her skin like ice chips followed by a warm shower.
“No—not at all.” She was freaked out by someone she’d only met four days ago calling her and asking her out for a date, since it had never happened to her. She tried to swallow the knot of nerves blocking her air passage. “It looks like I’m free tomorrow night.”
“Great. Why don’t I pick you up at your office—say around five thirty? Or is that too late for a Friday evening?”
Meredith pulled a pen from under the untidy stack of papers beside the computer and started drawing question marks on the back of a legal pad. “Sure. Five thirty. Here. Sounds fine.”
“I hope you like jazz music. I know the greatest little club down on the river. I thought maybe we could get dinner in downtown and then drive over to Town Square, stroll along the Riverwalk, and then sit and have coffee and listen to some jazz.”
The word JAZZ appeared in big, bold letters under her pen. “I love jazz. And if you’re talking about the Savoy, I’ve been wanting to go there since they opened.”
“Excellent. I’ll see you at five thirty tomorrow evening, then. I can’t wait.”
“Me, too.” She repeated his “Bye-bye now” farewell and hung up. She tapped the phone to her chin and glanced around the office, looking for some confirmation of what had just occurred.
Aside from the fact that for the last three months she’d been trying to think of some way to invite Major to go to the Savoy with her, she was excited about tomorrow night. The idea of going out with someone she didn’t know the first thing about—well, she knew he was a contractor, so didn’t know the second thing about—frightened her a little. But not as much as the blind dates Jenn wanted to set her up on.
Besides, if she was going to end her single status by this time next year, how else did she expect that to happen?
She leaned back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling. “Lord, please let him be a nice, normal, Christian guy—with no weird fetishes or obsessions. And if You could keep him from getting distracted by an attractive woman while we’re on our date, I would so appreciate it.”
Chapter 7
Major filled the thermal carafe with chicory-flavored dark roast, covered the platter holding warm croissants, strawberries and raspberries, bacon, shelled hard-boiled eggs, and a large ramekin of honey butter—everything he’d watched Meredith pile onto her plate the last time he’d seen her at one of her father’s prayer breakfasts—and added them to the rolling service cart. Preparing a meal for someone he was mad at always helped him overcome the feelings and approach the situation in a positive frame of mind.
The silverware rattled against the porcelain plates when the cart’s wheels bumped over the threshold of the freight elevator. He checked his watch again: 7:53. As long as she hadn’t decided to come in early this morning, he should be able to get everything set up on the small conference table in her office before she arrived.
With a grinding squeal and an unnerving bounce, the elevator stopped on the fifth floor. He swiped his security card on the reader beside the door directly across the hall. Dark quiet enveloped the smaller-scale kitchen—the place Alaine Delacroix decided would be just perfect for the cooking segments on her midday news show. The segments Meredith had never told him about.
He rubbed his tongue against the backs of his teeth. Maybe Meredith had a good reason for why she’d failed to tell him she’d volunteered him to do a weekly cooking demonstration in addition to his regular job. His full-time job at which he worked nearly fifty hours a week—even longer when gearing up for big events, like the upcoming Hearts to HEARTS banquet.
The soft wheels of the cart whispered across the wood floor in the executive dining room and hallway. Meredith’s office door stood open, and the lights were still off. Good. She wasn’t here yet.
He glanced around as he raised the dimmer switch to bring the lights up. The dark wood along the curved juncture of wall and ceiling, copper ceiling tiles, cream walls, and dark-wood floors made the room look like a Boston cream pie. His stomach rumbled. But the rest of the office—he cringed. Unkempt stacks of paperwork sat on her desk. She’d obviously done some work at the small round table, too, because the vase of bright pink flowers sat near the far edge, as if shoved aside.
Three minutes until eight o’clock. He moved the vase to the center of the table then set out the plates, napkins, silverware, and cups and saucers. He measured distances between utensils and china using his fingers—the way Maggie Babineaux had taught him—then stepped back to make sure everything looked uniform and symmetrical.
“What’s this?”
His stomach jumped at Meredith’s voice. He stepped aside so she had an unhindered view of the tablescape. “Breakfast.”
The shoulder strap of her overloaded briefcase fell from her shoulder into the crook of her elbow. She jolted to the side from the shift in weight, then hugged her arms around an opaque garment bag. “Breakfast?”
“Yes. You know, the meal that one usually eats first thing in the morning. Which for you typically consists of a child’s-size box of Cheerios, dry, and possibly a tub of applesauce, if you get around to eating it, with several cups of coffee, I believe.”
“What—do you have a nanny cam in here somewhere to keep up with my eating habits?” She smiled, but wariness still filled her eyes. She hung the garment bag on the coat hook on the back of the door then went around her desk, divested herself of her briefcase and purse, and turned on her computer.
“No, we’ve just had enough early morning meetings for me to observe the fact that you take a very haphazard approach to breakfast.” He clasped his hands behind his back to try to stop the itching sensation in his fingers from wanting to go to her desk and straighten up all of the paper stacks, line up the several sticky notes on the edge of her computer monitor, and close the partially opened file drawer in the credenza behind her desk. The office hadn’t looked this disheveled when he dropped off her dinner box yesterday afternoon.