When You Wish (Contemporary Romance) (14 page)

“What did she call me?” Garnet’s hands clenched into fists.

Grace stepped between them. “Now, auntie, we have a guest. Can you get the water?”

Garnet still wanted to belt her sister, Dan could see it in her eyes. Instead she spun on her heel and marched into the kitchen with Em.

Ruby snorted. “If I didn’t watch her every minute she’d sneak dead animals onto the table.”

“I can hardly wait for dinner,” Dan murmured.

“Ruby’s an avid vegetarian,” Grace explained. “And she does most of the cooking.”

“Which makes you all vegetarians?”

“Except for Garnet,” Ruby said. “She sneaks out to eat the dead on a bun.”

Dan’s craving for a bacon cheeseburger died right there.

“Never mind that now,” Grace soothed. “Dr. Chadwick is hungry.”

Ruby looked D
an up and down. “I bet he’s hungry a lot.”

Dan, accustomed
to being looked upon as different because of his size, if not his strange choice of professions, merely shrugged and remained silent.

Then Em walked in and laced her arm through his. “I do so like a great, big man. They make me feel small and protected.” She tugged on his arm and led him toward the table. “You can sit next to me, Doctor. You’re my special guest.” She shot a glare at Ruby.

Ruby sniffed. “I didn’t invite him. Since when do you like doctors?”

“Since I met this one.” Em beamed at Dan.

For some reason Dan’s usual stiffness around people evaporated around Em. After a few moments in her company he even stopped staring at the cobra headdress that rose up between her eyes.

Em regaled him
with five husbands’ worth of adventures. She had loved; she had hated; she had traveled; she had lived. Dan was mesmerized. The bowls of food kept coming; Dan kept helping himself and eating. He had to admit that though there wasn’t a single dead thing in the bunch, the meal was wonderful.

“And then my fourth husband, or was it my fifth?” Em glanced at Grace, who shrugged and took more caramelized carrots. “Doesn’t matter. He took me to Hong Kong, and we brought back this lovely cloth with gold woven right through. Remember, sisters?”

Garnet and Ruby nodded, continuing to eat and glare at each other. Luckily no more arguments or fork fights had broken out.

“We made a crazy quilt and took first prize in a contest sponsored by one of the
quilting magazines.”

“Three thousand dollars,” Grace put in. “Start-up money for their business.”

Dan nodded. With the resurgence of interest in history and things made the old-fashioned way, as well as an upswing in mail order sales and the Internet, he thought the Jewels were on to something with Quilts to Order.

Ruby began to clear the table. “Would you like dessert, Doctor?” She had become friendlier and friendlier the more he ate and ate.

“Call me Dan,” he said automatically. Doctor this, doctor that. Drove him nuts.

“Dan.” She beamed at him like he’d just said something so darn cute. Dan wasn’t used to being looked at like that.
He liked it. “I made cherry cobbler. No eggs, soy milk.”

Garnet made a face behind her sister’s back.

“Uh . . .” Dan hesitated, then thought of how wonderful the entire vegetarian meal had been. “Sure,” he said and earned a smile from everyone but Garnet.

The Jewels bustled into the kitchen. Dan glanced at Grace, and, as usual, discovered he didn’t want to look at anything else. “Thank you for dinner. It was wonderful.”

“You think? A lot of people would have been asking, ‘Where’s the meat?’”

“How rude.” His mother would have been one of them.

“Yes, isn’t it?” She reached over and put her hand atop his, where it lay on the table. “Thank you for being so sweet to my aunts. Not everyone is.”

Dan frowned. “Who?”

“Now you look and sound like Olaf. ‘Who dares to be inappropriate to my Jewels?’”

“Well, who dares?”

“To be honest, since we moved to Lake Illusion last spring, folks have been pretty nice.”

“People weren’t nice where you used to live?”

“In Minneapolis there were so many people that most were indifferent.”

“And before that?”

The smile she’d turned on him faded. “Before that people were less nice.”

“You mean in your hometo
wn? I don’t understand.”

“It might have been my hometown, but I never belonged there. That’s why I didn’t go back. Home has always been wherever my aunts are. And now Olaf, too. A place where I feel comfortable, safe, and needed.”

“Lake Illusion?”

“Right now, yes, Lake Illusion.”

A companionable silence settled between them. He understood what she meant about home being a state of mind and not a place. He felt the same way. In fact, he felt at home right here.

The comforting sounds of the Jewels scraping plates and loading the dishwasher were music to Dan, who usually ate alone in the midst of a great big silence. Sometimes being alone was not all it was cracked up to be—even though he’d always told himself he preferred it. When you were alone you had no one to disappoint but yourself.

Grace sat back and her hand went with her, leaving Dan empty and cold. He clenched his fingers into a fist to keep from entreating her return. Afraid she’d get up and help the Jewels in the kitchen, his mind searched for a topic of conversation to keep her at the table with him.

“You never did tell me what you went to college to be, once upon a time.”

Her face froze and Dan cursed himself for an idiot. He wanted to take the question back, but it was too late. Of all the possible topics of conversation, trust him to pick the wrong one.

“I was going to be a lawyer,” she said.

“Huh?”
Excellent comeback, Dan,
his mind taunted.

“Actually I pursued a degree in history. It didn’t take long before I’d had enough.”

“Don’t feel bad, a lot of students can’t handle the pressure or the classes. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“That wasn’t why I stopped. I was number one in my class, and at the time, pressure was like a drug to me. Until my father died, and I saw what stress could do to a person.”

“How did your father die?”

“Stress-related coronary. He was a workaholic. It killed him—plain and simple.”

“So you dropped out of college because of that?”

“I dropped out before that.”

“Why?”

“People took one look at me and thought ‘flake’ or worse.”

Dan’s cheeks burned. He’d done exactly that. “Couldn’t you have played the game long enough to get your degree?”

“I’m not good at games. I could change the way I dressed, cut my hair, wear shoes every damn day, but I can’t change my face. My skin is this color, my eyes are, too. My name is Lighthorse, and I’m proud of it.
That’s
what I learned once upon a time.”

She tilted her c
hin and the light hit her cheekbones, turning her skin to gold. Dan caught his breath. She was so beautiful—so fascinating both inside and out—how could anyone have seen her as anything less than priceless? He wanted to find those people and tear them limb from limb. Perhaps he and Olaf had more in common than Dan had thought.

“I still don’t understand why anyone would care what you looked like in college.”

“This was over ten years ago. We had problems up here with treaty rights. Sovereign nation versus the state. Screaming matches in the night.” At his blank look, Grace raised her eyebrows. “It was on the news every night.”

“I wasn’t here ten years ago. I was in Arizona.”
Miserable
, his mind added. But he wasn’t going back to Arizona, so there was no need to hyperventilate. Just reassuring himself of that made Dan’s breathing slow into the normal range.

“Tensions were high back then. No one liked In
dians.”

“Is that why you didn’t go home when you moved back to Wisconsin?”

“Mostly. Even though things have settled down a bit, the anger still bubbles beneath the surface. The fact that my father was on the legal team for the tribe did not endear him to the populace, no matter how hard he tried to walk the line between two worlds.”

“You’re angry at him still.” Dan could hear it in her voice.

The look she gave him seared right to his belly. He’d hit the nail on the head, but she didn’t like his insight much.

“Maybe. Nothing I did was ever right enough for him. Yet it was all right for him to be whatever
he
wished to be.” She shrugged. “I worked for him while I went to massage school. He
loved
that.”

Her sarcasm confused him. “Loved what? You're working for him?”

“That, he loved. He wanted me to be a doctor, or a lawyer—definitely not an Indian chief, or a massage therapist.”

“You lost me.”

“My grandparents are some of the few full blood Ojibwe left. They pitched a fit when my father married my mother. But he took one look at her and
bam
.” She smacked her palms together. “It was like lightning, he said. Love.”

Dan couldn’t help but smile. He liked stories, and Grace was a very good storyteller.

“Funny thing, my mother was the free spirit, my father the driven one. What he loved in her, annoyed the heck out of him in me. My grandparents came to adore my mother, because through her they were able to teach me all that my father had turned his back on.”

“But he represented the Ojibwe, you said. He didn’t turn his back on them.”

“Not the tribe, or their treaty rights, true. But he wanted nothing to do with
being
Ojibwe. My grandparents still live in the same house where Dad was born. They prefer to live simply. My dad couldn’t wait to get out.”

“Not such an uncommon story.”

Grace shrugged. “He wanted to be exactly what he was: a famous, respected attorney. He was on all the newscasts. He protected the treaty rights. And he died for it. The doctors told him to slow down. I told him. He was too busy making a name, and trying to get me to be his partner.” Guilt colored her voice but she kept going. “My mother never recovered from his death. She lives on a lake in Minnesota. All alone with her pictures of him.”

Dan had never had much of an imagination, but Grace conjured quite an image. If he closed his eyes he could see her mother, staring at the lake from the porch of a lonely
cabin, holding tightly to a picture of the man she had loved and lost.

Dan blinked very fast and changed the subject. “You didn’t want to be a lawyer?”

“Hell, no. I saw what it did to him. The hours, the pressure, the need to help everyone, all the time. I want to help people, but I want to help them live, not wage legal battles half the time they can’t win. My dad didn’t understand. He called me a touchy-feely flake, figured I’d give it up eventually and join him. I was too smart to keep at such nonsense all my life.”

Nice way to talk to your kid,
Dan thought, but he’d heard the same line often enough himself. “Just how smart are you?”

“Smart enough to know I’m no lawyer. No doctor, either. My father thought I was betraying everything he stood for, everything he’d fought for. He believed we needed to be more than we’d ever been before to take our people forward. I think everyone just needs to be who they are.”

Her face had a sad cast that might have been a trick of the light, but the slump of her shoulders and the heaviness in her voice made Dan think the light did not trick him at all.

“I think you’re right, and I like who you are.”

“Oh, really?” She raised her eyebrows and leaned her elbows on the table. The sadness had fled, and she was confrontational once more. She made him dizzy for more reasons than one. “Then why are you trying to take away what’s important to me? Project Hope is right, too. It’s who I am. It’s what those sick kids need.”

For just a moment Dan wanted to agree. He wanted to give her everything she asked. But if he did that, everything
he’d
spent years working toward, all he’d given up, all he’d turned his back upon, would be worthless. His research would never come to fruition, and everything his parents had said would happen when he’d refused to be who they wanted him to be and insisted he had to be who he was, would happen. Grace, of all people, should understand that.

“I can’t. You see I—”

“Em! Em! What’s the matter, sister?”

A dull thump from the kitchen and a muffled cry sent the blood from Grace’s face. She leapt to her feet and ran for the doorway. Dan was right behind her.

The scene that awaited Grace in the kitchen nearly sent her heart into failure. Em lay on the floor, pale and wan, her hand to her chest, eyes closed, breathing erratic. Ruby and Garnet fluttered around, each patting a shoulder—flustered, helpless, terrified.

Dan bumped into Grace, causing her to stumble a few feet into the room. At least that got her moving instead of standing there imagining the funeral. She couldn’t function if she couldn’t think, couldn’t move.