Happy Ever After by Nora Roberts Page A

passed that phrase around plenty already.”
    “Don’t mention it.” He eased back. “I like your house. Who wouldn’t, but I mean I like how it works. I like seeing and figuring out how things work.”
    “How the house works?”
    “House, home, business. Canvas.”
    She paused at that, a flower in her hand, and just stared at him.
    “You let people paint the picture they want on it.You guide a lot of the strokes, maybe influence them toward certain colors, but they get what they want at the end of it. It’s good work.”
    “Th—” The phone saved her from another thank-you. “Excuse me. Hello, Bonnie, what can I do for you?” She wandered a few paces away.
    Malcolm heard the hysteria through the phone even before Parker yanked it an inch from her ear. “I see.Yes, I . . .”
    He listened—why the hell not—and began to stick flowers in the vase himself.
    “Of course I understand. But I also think you’re very stressed just now, again understandably. I bet Richie is, too. Well, Bonnie, your mother isn’t marrying Richie, and though I know she loves him, she doesn’t know him the way you do. I think, if Richie thought of it as anything other than a silly, blowing-off-steam male tradition, he’d never have told you. But he did, and the way he did tells me he thinks of it as a joke. His brother’s just doing what brothers often do.”
    She closed her eyes a moment, listened as she thumbed out a Tums. “Yes, I do understand, but you’re not marrying Richie’s brother. I’m sure none of you, really, want something as unimportant as this to cause any sort of a family rift.”
    She listened again. “Yes. Mmm-hmm. Does Richie love you? Mmm-hmm. Has he given you any reason to doubt that, any reason not to trust him? What I think isn’t important. It’s what you think, and what you feel. But since you asked, I think I’d laugh it off, and I’d go have a wonderful time with my friends before I spent the next week getting ready to marry the man I’m just crazy about.”
    While she wound it up, he finished the arrangement, then stepped back, hands tucked in his back pockets to study the result.
    “That’s nicely done,” Parker commented.
    “It’s not bad. So . . . problem?”
    “Nothing major.”
    “The groom’s brother’s hired a stripper for the bachelor party. She projected,” Malcolm added, “really well.”
    “I guess she did.Yes, and the bride hit flashpoint, aided by the fury and dire warnings of her mother—who really doesn’t think anyone’s good enough for her baby girl, and will, I predict, always find fault with Richie.”
    “She wanted you to back her up.”
    “Naturally.”
    “And you soothed and smoothed while managing to turn it back on her. Nice wrangling,Tex.”
    “If you’re mature enough to marry, you ought to be mature enough to stop crying to Mommy every time something upsets you. And if she doesn’t trust her perfectly affable, devoted, and honest-to-a-fault fiancé not to jump on a stripper a week before the wedding, she shouldn’t marry him.”
    “That’s not what you said to her.”
    “Because she’s the client.” She caught herself.“And I shouldn’t be saying it to you.”
    “Hey, what’s said in the—What is this room?”
    “Butler’s pantry.”
    “No shit?” He let out a half laugh as he scanned the space again. “Okay, what’s said in the butler’s pantry stays in the butler’s pantry.” That got a smile out of her, a faint one. “You calmed her down.”
    “For now anyway. They’re moving to Atlanta—he’s been transferred—in a couple months.The mother is supremely pissed over that, and it’s the very best thing that could happen. They’ve got a good chance, I think, if she gets out from under Mommy’s thumb.”
    “It tensed you up.”
    She shrugged and picked up the vase. “I’ll get over it.”
    “I gotta ask you something.”
    She glanced back at him as they walked out. “What?”
    “Do you own a pair of