Life After Wife (Three Magic Words Trilogy, #3)(14)

“What in the devil is a forever thing?” he asked.

“It’s a thing that lasts way past attraction and saying the vows in front of a preacher. It’s something that endures the fights as well as the good times right up until the last breath is drawn. That’s a forever thing,” she answered.

The buzzer went off again, and he took his food to the table. “I didn’t ask about your two best buds. I asked about you,” he said.

“I thought Native Americans had the patience of Job. That they could sit beside a tree for six weeks waiting on a deer to come by.” She picked up her fork and began to eat.

“You trying to psych me out by making me wait. You might be surprised,” he said after a few minutes.

“No, just deciding whether I want to share even this much about me with you. Evidently you already know more about me than I do you.”

“Aunt Maud wrote to me every week. I did the same unless it wasn’t possible for security reasons. Last letter I got was a week before she died. She told me exactly what to do and what she planned.”

Sophie filed that bit of news away with the intention of turning Maud’s room upside down for those letters. Maud never threw a thing away, so they’d be stuffed somewhere, and Sophie fully intended to find them and read them!

“OK, we called them our three magic words. Mine was life after wife. That’s what it’ll take for me to ever trust a man again. So I don’t have to worry about ever marryin’ another fellow. Because there’s not one out there who can give me that,” she said between bites of ham, candied yams, and cranberry salad.

“What do you mean by those words? Life after wife? Doesn’t make a bit of sense to me,” he said.

She sighed. “‘Life’ as in living and breathing and companionship and trust. ‘After’ as in after the wedding ceremony. ‘Wife’ as in opposite of husband.”

He looked up with questions written on his face.

“A man would have to prove to me, beyond a doubt, that he was giving me a life after the wedding. My dead husband showed me that the title of wife doesn’t necessarily mean much. I want the courtship and the dating and all that romance. But then I want a promise that it will go on after I get the wife title. I want the romance to extend past the day when I stand up before the preacher and vow to love some old boy forever, amen.”

“I think I understand,” he said.

“I doubt it. Men do not have the ability to understand that.”

He smiled for the first time. “Oh, I understand all right. You want the absolute impossiblest thing in the world. No one can give you that promise, and if they did they’d be lying through their teeth.”

“‘Impossiblest’ is not a word.”

“Life after wife isn’t a possibility.” His tone hung in the air like frost even though it was over a hundred degrees outside.

“That’s what I’ve been telling you, moron. I’m not marrying again ever.” She accentuated each word with a poke of her fork toward him.

“Ever?”

She ignored the one word question.

“You going to answer?” Elijah asked.

“I was thinking about Kate. Get Hart to tell you how they got together. She said never ever, and it came back around to bite her on the fanny. I was just trying to be sure that I meant it, and I really do. So there, Elijah Jones.”

“Tell me about Hart and Kate,” Elijah said.

“Not me. No, sir. You want to know how they got together, you ask Hart. I already know. You ready to look at the rest of the books?”





CHAPTER FOUR


“Don’t start without me,” Kate yelled at the door.

Fancy grabbed her arm and hurried her to the kitchen where Sophie sat at the bar with a glass of tea in her hand. “There’re cookies that Dessa made before she left on Friday. Tina is taking a nap, and Theron is at the church with the preacher interviewing a new youth minister. Sophie wouldn’t say a word until you got here, and I’m dyin’ to hear. Your tea is already poured, so sit down.”

Kate downed half the glass of tea, picked up a cookie, and bit off a healthy chunk. “Dessa is a godsend. Don’t ever let Theron fire her.”

“Dessa isn’t going anywhere.” Fancy looked at Sophie. “OK, now tell us what happened since the funeral.”

Kate picked up another cookie and turned around to face Sophie too. “Shoot,” she said.

“Nothing much. Just the expected. He made this big to-do about getting up early and making a lot of noise, so if I didn’t like it, I could sell out to him right then. So the next morning I was up and had breakfast ready before he even crawled out of bed. I hope it shocked the dickens out of him, because it wasn’t easy getting up at four thirty or lying about it either,” Sophie said.

Kate giggled and her pecan-colored eyes lit up. She wore cut-off jean shorts that were frayed at the hems and stopped mid-thigh. A bright orange tank top stretched over her frame like a second skin, and her black hair was pulled up with a big plastic clip.

“I told you that she’d get ahead of him on the first rattle out of the bucket,” Fancy said.

She was almost five feet tall and eight months pregnant. Her pale blue maternity top was stretched out to the last thread. She had clipped her blonde hair up to keep it from sticking to her neck. She had blue eyes, but they weren’t the same color as Elijah’s. Fancy’s had the warmth of a summer sky. Elijah’s had the chill of a mountaintop capped with a layer of snow.