SEAL the Deal (13 page)

Lacey glowered as Mick placed an S at the
end of Maeve’s last word. “‘Unsafes’ is not a word.”

Mick and Jack looked at each other and
said in unison, “Yes, it is.”

Bess raised her eyebrows. “Use it in a
sentence,” she dared.

Mick looked nonplussed. “The officer safes
his weapon. He then unsafes his weapon, preparing to fire.” The two men exchanged
mutual nods, satisfied.

“What?”

“He unsafes his weapon,” Mick repeated
condescendingly, as though he were using a word they had all learned in the
first grade. “Unsafes—as in make not safe. Makes it easy to fire.”

“I repeat,
what
?”

“It is a word.” Mick glanced over at Jack.

“It’s a word,” Jack agreed.

Maeve’s eyes narrowed. “I challenge your
word.”

Bess, the keeper of the dictionary,
searched its pages. “Maeve wins the challenge. It’s not in the dictionary.”

“But it
is
a word.”

“Well, we agreed upon this dictionary,” she
said, waggling the pocket dictionary from her college days in Mick’s face. “Not
some Dictionary of Weird Military Terms. Here’s your S,” Bess said with
authority pulling his tile off the board. “You lose your turn.”

Mick stood. “This is so unfair, you’re
driving me to drink. Can I get you anything, Jack? Beer? More chips?” he asked,
pointedly ignoring Bess’s empty soda can and Lacey’s depleted wine glass.

“Fine. I’ll get ours,” Lacey muttered. “Another
ginger ale, Bess?”

Bess nodded her thanks.

Lacey let the screen door slam behind her
as she entered the kitchen. “You are a poor loser, Mick.”

“Military guys don’t like it when we’re
not winning. Works to our advantage in war. Besides, I haven’t lost yet.”

“Yeah, but to resort to making up words.”

“Unsafes
is
a word.” Mick moved
quickly to corner her in front of the open refrigerator. He gazed down at her,
his lips not more than an inch from hers. “‘The lady suddenly felt unsafes in
the aroused officer’s presence.’ Unsafes: the plural of unsafe when you feel
very, very unsafe.” There was a playful, daring flash in his eyes. For exactly
ten seconds, they both said nothing, knowing exactly what should happen next,
and knowing it wouldn’t.

Jack called in from the back porch. “Hey,
Maeve is claiming a zovare is a kind of window treatment. Z-O-V-A-R-E. Do I
challenge her?”

Lacey’s eyes never wavered from Mick’s. “It’s
a word. Zovare. My mom used to have those in our family room,” she called into
Jack.

“Do I trust her, Mick?”

His eyes still locked on Lacey’s, Mick studied
her. “Trust her. She’s beyond reproach.”

Sucker, Lacey thought. Zovare? That
made-up word probably pushed Maeve well into the lead with that Z and V. Stepping
back onto the porch, she shared a conspiratorial look with Maeve and glanced
down at the score sheet. 54-point word with the triple word score space falling
behind Maeve’s A tile. Not bad for a bluff.

“Girls are in the lead,” Maeve gloated.

Mick grunted, and seemed resigned to
change the subject. “So what’s the next step on the house renovation, Maeve?”

“Solarium. The guys are coming to blast a
hole in my family room wall soon. There was a bit of a delay because of the
permits. Damn bureaucracy.”

“What the hell is a solarium?”

“A room with lots of glass—you know—like
a sunroom. For plants.”

“I didn’t know you had a green thumb,”
Jack said, placing three letter tiles on the game board.

“I don’t. But I had a client in DC who has
a solarium. It was gorgeous, all sunny and bright and filled with orchids and
exotic plants. I just knew I had to have one.”

Jack cocked his head. “So you know nothing
about plants, but you’re building an entire addition for them?”

“I’ll learn.” Maeve cast Jack a sharp
look. “And it’s a small addition. They’ll be breaking ground on it later this
month.”

“Handpicked the crew yourself, right,
Maeve?” Lacey smiled.

Maeve batted her eyes innocently. “Now
what on earth are you insinuating?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that any time
you hire anyone, they’re very, well—”

“Built,” Bess offered. “I don’t think I’ve
ever seen so many hot men before in my life. And that lawnmower guy?”

All three women let out discerning sighs.

“Did you ever catch a look at him when he
first revs up the motor? The way his muscles all bunch up? Oh, God.” Lacey
fanned herself.

Looking annoyed and more than a little
jealous, Jack and Mick slouched in their chairs.

“Don’t remind me,” Maeve said sadly. “He
told me last week that he’s leaving Annapolis. I don’t know who I’ll get to mow
the lawn.”

“Is that the guy I saw over here on Thursday
evening?” Mick asked.

“Mmhm.”

“Well, that explains it.”

“Explains what?” Jack asked with sudden
interest.

Mick let out a low laugh. “I pulled up to
the house, and I see Maeve handing some sweaty guy with no shirt a stack of
bills.”

Lacey laughed. “Why didn’t you just ask
who he was?”

Mick threw his hands up. “Hey, if Maeve is
paying cash to some guy who looks like an underwear model, I’m not asking
questions. Not my business.”

Jack shifted uncomfortably. “So he’s not
coming back?”

“Nope. I’ll just have to rely on the
kindness of strangers.” Maeve pulled out a little of the Southern drawl from
her youth.

“Don’t look at me,” Jack said. “I’m not
mowing your lawn without some sort of payment in return.”

Maeve rolled her eyes, and then set her
sights on Mick.

“Look elsewhere. Between my family’s house
growing up, and four years of mowing Doc and Mrs. B’s lawn, I’m done with
landscaping till I get a house of my own.”

“You mowed Mrs. B’s lawn?”

“Sure. All of us did things like that for
them. We hung out at their house enough that we were glad to do it.”

Maeve pulled her attention fully away from
the letters in front of her for the first time all night. “You’re saying that
plebes will sometimes mow the lawns of their sponsors?”

Lacey groaned, realizing where this was
headed.

Maeve slapped her hand on the table. “I
want one,” she said decisively.

“Maeve, you don’t sponsor a plebe to get
your lawn mowed. You sponsor someone because you want to give them a home away
from home.”

“That’s fine with me. I can provide a home
away from home. I do it for you all, don’t I? My God, maybe we could find one
who could babysit,” she concluded triumphantly, raising her eyebrows and giving
a slight nod to Bess’s belly. “Do I get to pick one out? I’d want to make sure
he could handle a bit of hard labor.”

“No, Maeve. It’s not like picking out a
puppy at the pound,” Jack commented.

After a brief silence, Maeve scowled at
the looks of reproach from her friends. “Why are you all looking at me like
that? I was just kidding.”

The others narrowed their eyes on her.

Maeve relented. “Okay. I was half kidding.
Give me some credit, will you?”

***

It really had been a grand idea. Maeve
laughed to herself, picking up two empty soda cans from the table on the back
porch, and envisioning a young, virile midshipman mowing her lawn for free. If
only she didn’t have that troublesome streak of decency. She must have
inherited that from Gram.

The smell of onions and mushrooms wafted
out the kitchen window and onto the porch. Maeve usually enjoyed spending
mornings on her back deck sipping her coffee. But the smell of an omelet—a
real omelet, not the kind you pour from a carton—cooking up in her
kitchen was something of a rarity. She headed back inside.

Lacey sat at the kitchen table watching
Bess efficiently chop vegetables with the precision of a master chef. “I had no
idea you could cook like this.”

Bess tossed a smile over her shoulder. “It’s
easy, really. You just follow the directions.”

Maeve chimed in. “No. Heating up a can of
spaghetti is following directions. What you’re doing is an art form.”

“I used to love making brunch for Dan on
Sunday mornings,” she began, and then immediately clammed up.

Maeve shot her a questioning look. “Dan?”

Bess quickly busied herself looking for
the cheddar in the fridge. “Yeah. Umm. He’s my ex-boyfriend. You know, the
dad.”

“You mean, sperm donor. It takes a lot
more than a night in the sack to make a dad,” Lacey corrected, earning a nod of
approval from Maeve.

“He’s… umm…” Bess struggled, and the
expression on her face wasn’t that of frustration or resentment as Maeve would
have expected. It was fear.

“He’s not here,” Maeve finished for her. “So
that pretty much says enough to me. Is that mine?” she asked, quickly changing the
subject.

“Mmhm.” Bess handed her a steaming plate.

“Glad you didn’t offer up these cooking
skills last night or those guys would be on our doorstep every day.” Maeve smacked
her lips enthusiastically as she took her first bite.

Bess grinned. “Oh, I don’t think it takes
good food to keep them coming back. Just takes you two.”

“I’ve made it pretty clear to Jack that
I’m not interested. I don’t backtrack.”

“Try convincing him that.”

“He’ll get frustrated and move on.” She
went to the fridge. “Now Mick is another story. I don’t know why you aren’t
doing a little horizontal tango with that man, Lacey. Orange juice, anyone?”

Lacey and Bess shook their heads.

“He’s not interested in me.” Lacey received
two sets of rolling eyes in response. “Seriously. He even told me that. He’s
just not looking for someone to settle down with right now.”

“Who said anything about settling down? You
just need a regular aerobic workout. It’s cheaper than joining a gym,” Maeve
teased as the phone rang. She picked it up. “Hello?” she snapped with her mouth
half stuffed with food. “Hello-oo?” She shook her head at the silence and hung
up, glancing at the caller ID display. “No one. That’s the third unknown name-unknown
number that’s hung up on me recently.”

Bess’s ears perked up. “Really?”

“It’s starting to piss me off.” Maeve
shrugged carelessly. “Anyway, I know you want to focus on career now, but you
can’t avoid distractions forever. And men are such lovely distractions.”

 “It’s not just that. It’s the way we
met—at a funeral where I was trying to get real estate business. Some
people might find that… distasteful.”

Maeve snorted. “That’s one word for it.” Noticing
Lacey’s wounded expression, she followed up, “Creative is another word. Or
savvy. That’s what your sister would say, right?”

“Well, I’m not my sister, as I prove time
and again. Besides, that house means so much to him. He’d hate thinking that I
was trying to sell it behind his back.”

Maeve batted a hand hastily through the
air. “But you aren’t. She hasn’t shown any interest in selling it, right? So,
just come clean and tell him.”

“Yeah, but then he might let it slip to
Edith that I crashed her husband’s funeral. She’d never list her house with me
if she ever did decide to sell. She might even call the funeral home and
complain. Or complain to my broker at the office.”

“That’s a lot of what-ifs, Lacey.”

Lacey sighed. “You’re probably right. Maybe
I will fess up.”

Maeve took the last bite of her omelet and
fought the urge to ask Bess for another. “Speaking of funerals, are you going
to that one I found for you in last Sunday’s obits? It is today, right?”

“Yeah. It’s got some promise, actually. I’m
covering phones in the office this morning and then I’m taking a newlywed
couple around town to see some homes at noon. Then I’ll drive straight there. It
starts at two. I think I’ll make it in time.”

Maeve raised her eyebrows to Bess. “She
works hard for the money.”

“Except that the money’s not coming in
yet,” Lacey grumbled. “I better go get ready. There’s a black suit upstairs
with my name on it.” She loaded her plate into the dishwasher. “Thanks for
breakfast, Bess. It was incredible. For every omelet you make, I promise to
change one diaper.”

“Then I better see you for breakfast every
morning.”

At the ring of her cell, Lacey snapped her
phone open. “Hello? Oh, hello Edith. How are you? … Yes, I did make those calls
about auction donations and got lucky with four of them. … What? … No, I
wouldn’t mind at all, though I really think you might want to wait before you
make any decisions like that. … Well, okay. I can draw up some comps and stop
by. … Thursday’s fine. … No, don’t you dare feed me brunch. … All right then. Thanks,
Edith. See you then.” She slid her phone into her purse.