year. But she’s not going to be looking for a while. Actually, let me put a reminder so I don’t forget when she is ready to re-enter the fray.” Lacey picked up her phone, opened her calendar, typed a note to herself and set a recurring six-monthly appointment.
Anna would kill both her and Rachel if she had any idea this conversation was happening. Like proper dead. Which reminded her. She should update her will to include Anna and Libby.
“I’m sorry.” Beckett was partly leaning across the table. “Did you just put an appointment in your calendar to contact me when your bereaved friend is looking for another husband?”
Lacey placed her phone back on the table. “Honestly, she’s probably never going to be looking for another husband because Cam—that’s her first husband—was the love of her life. Like the ‘I wasn’t sure how she would keep breathing when he died’ kind of love. But you’re great, and she’s great, so who knows what could happen.”
Beckett shook his head. “I have to be honest. This isn’t how I saw this evening going.”
“I’m just saying. You believe in God. She believes in God. She lives in Colorado. You train there, right? Maybe this is all part of his grand plan. Don’t you guys say God works in mysterious ways?”
Beckett’s eyes were so wide she almost wondered if he was going to abandon dinner and make a run for it. Luckily his path was blocked by the waiter arriving with their meals. And she was pretty sure she hadn’t yet reached the crazy date level where a man would walk away from a bowl of freshly made carbonara.
Beckett tipped his head back and laughed. “Never have I taken a woman on a date only to have her ask me to take a rain check for a year on a date with a friend and convince me it might be God’s will when she doesn’t even believe in God and have me actually contemplating the idea.”
Lacey grinned at him. “I guess now you know how I sell so many books.”
Sigh. Beckett was off the table. So much for him being the one knocking Victor from the perch he’d somehow taken up in her head.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A gaggle of page boys and flower girls. Could Lacey call them that? There were only four, but it felt like more. Many, many more.
“Katherine and Charlotte! Freeze!” Lacey bellowed as her two half-cousins eyed up a mud puddle in front of the church. Images of their white tulle skirts and ballet slippers covered in brown muck seared her mind.
She hobbled forward in her fitted dress and wrapped her fingers firmly around their wrists. “Where are your flower baskets, girls?”
They both looked up at her and shrugged, faces angelic. “Pwetty flowers.” Charlotte lisped the words then wrinkled her brow. “Potty?”
This was not in Lacey’s job description. She was only here alone with them because the photographer had insisted they go ahead while she took a few final photos of Emelia.
She looked around for their mother. Carolina’s hat was a flying saucer-like construction that could probably be spotted from space, but she had chosen that moment to be conspicuously absent. Of course.
“Charlotte threw her flowers in the toilet,” Katherine spoke with all the authority of the tattling older sibling. “I told her not to, but she did it anyway.”
Charlotte nodded, her ringleted brunette curls bouncing. “Pwetty flowers go floating.”
Excellent. Fifty bucks of hand-picked rose petals down the drain.
“And then George pooped on them!” Katherine looked positively gleeful as she imparted that unnecessary detail.
Reason #243 why Lacey could never see herself with kids.
“Not on purpose.” George bellowed from across the driveway. “You didn’t tell me they were in there, and I told you I was busting!”
The seven-year-old had been wearing a permanently offended expression since he’d been levered into a cream shirt and a pair of grey silk breeches an hour earlier. Lacey didn’t blame him. His oldest brother was supposed to be in the bridal party as well but—like any self-respecting ten-year-old—had flat out refused when he’d seen the getup he was expected to wear.
“Well, we can’t do anything about Charlotte’s flowers. But where are yours?” Lacey let go of Katherine’s wrist to pick up the bottom of her own skirt before she put a heel through it. Another cream creation.
Lacey had thought Emelia was joking when her cousin said she was going to be wearing white. Even though, like millions of other Americans, she’d gotten up at some awful hour one