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“Just a lot of Henry misbehaving,” Ellen said. “Your dress is back there in the changing room. Get it on, and then when you come out, you can help me grill Katie about her love life.”
“Katie has a love life?” Carly smiled. “It’s about time. I’ll be right back.”
“Thanks for that,” Katie said, watching Carly go. “Really looking forward to our special girl-bonding session.”
“You’d better give me some good intel,” Ellen said with a smirk. “I’m on assignment. Caleb told me if I don’t find out what’s going on with you and Sean, he’s not coming over tonight. He’s just going to camp out at you guys’ house until you show up to take a shower or something, and then he’ll lock you in and make you talk.”
“That might have worked if you hadn’t just told me about it in advance.”
“It’s not going to be necessary. You’re going to tell me everything I want to know. I have lawyerly ways.”
“I’m so scared.”
“As you should be.”
“Where’s Amber?” Katie asked. Her older sister was the other bridesmaid.
“She came in for her fitting yesterday. She had something to do this morning for one of the boys. Judo lesson, maybe?”
Katie hadn’t seen Amber in a while. She needed to call her, ask how the boys and Tony were doing. She didn’t want to be a bad sister. But she had so many other things on her m
ind. Chiefly, at the moment, the fact that Judah had dropped off the face of the earth. Somehow, he’d managed to disappear without his security team noticing, and Paul had called Sean at five o’clock this morning with a frantic request for help.
Beside him in bed, Katie overheard the call, and she and Sean had immediately gotten to work. All day, Sean had been on the computer, and she’d been doing whatever he told her to do—making calls, tracking down information, and, when she ran out of other ideas, scouring the fan profiles in his database in the hope of finding some filter, some clue, that would reveal what had happened to Judah. She kept hoping he would call her—or call somebody. Sean was monitoring her phone just in case, and he’d figured out a way to track the GPS in Judah’s cell, but either Judah had ditched his phone or he’d turned it off, because they weren’t getting anything.
It wasn’t a good time to be standing still, getting pinned into a gown while Ellen gave her the third degree.
Carly emerged in a black cocktail-style dress with spaghetti straps, knee-length like Katie’s but tight all the way down. Jamie wolf-whistled, his face lit with genuine appreciation. He’d picked a poor moment to look away from Henry, though. The mention of judo had inspired Henry to show off his karate kicks, and when Jamie looked away, Henry kicked him in the nuts.
Jamie collapsed on the carpet. Dora grinned her gummy grin while Henry hovered over his limp body, saying, “Uncle Jamie? Uncle Jamie?”
“Poor Jamie,” Ellen said. “You all right?”
He gave her the finger.
“He’s all right,” Ellen said. Carly started to laugh, and then Ellen joined her, and they didn’t stop until they had tears in their eyes and the seamstresses had to give up and wait for them to stop clutching their stomachs and helplessly hanging onto one another’s bare shoulders.
“Ohhh,” Carly said after a long while, wiping the tears away with one knuckle. “That was worth the price of admission right there.”
“Be nice to your uncle, sweetie,” Ellen called. “Take it easy on him, or he won’t buy you ice cream.”
At the mention of ice cream, Henry forgot about Jamie’s distress and began jumping around and peppering him with questions. Jamie shot his sister a look that said, quite clearly, You’re a bitch, and I hate you.
“Have fun,” Ellen said. “We should be done in half an hour or so.”
A few minutes later, Jamie had gathered up the troops and hobbled out of the shop, headed for the Friendly’s down the road to provide ice cream in the dead of winter to a boy too young to care that it wasn’t seasonally appropriate and a baby too young to eat it.
The older seamstress craned her head to watch him disappear through the shop window. When she brought her attention back to the dress, the other women were all staring.
“What?” she asked around a mouth full of pins. “Your man has an ass on him.”
“I know,” Carly said smugly. “I taught him to cook, too.”
That made even Katie smile. Only the teenage seamstress remained unmoved, obviously mortified by her mother’s bawdy humor.
Katie’s phone chirped, and she leaned down to scoop it off the floor, clutching the strapless bodice of the dress to her chest to keep it from taking a dive.
It was a text from Judah. R u there? Need 2 talk 2 u. The relief that flooded through her told her how worried she’d been that he’d never call her again. That he was dead somewhere, felled by the candlestick in the conservatory or the rope in the green room, and she’d have to feel guilty about it for the rest of her life.
