An Honorable Man

“Here, let me try,” Roark said.

“You? You don’t have kids, do you?”

“Just an endless stream of nieces and nephews. But I spend as much time with them as I can. Whenever I go home to visit, someone is always teething.” He took the baby, who wore a ruffled pink dress and matching booties, and held her up, looking her in the face. “Hi, Josephina. Can you look at me?” And he proceeded to make faces at her while Tony tried not to laugh.

The baby was so startled by the faces that she did stop crying, at least for the moment. Roark gently swung her back and forth. She stared wide-eyed at him.

“How’d you do that?” Tony asked.

“It’s probably just the novelty of a new face,” Roark admitted. “She might start crying again any minute.”

“Let me try it,” Tony said, holding out his hands. Before he could take the baby, though, Jasmine came running down the steps.

“Dad, wait till you see this. You won’t believe it!”

Moments later, a cloud of florid pink chiffon barely contained in a clear plastic bag descended the stairs, and somewhere behind it was Priscilla—in curlers.

The men froze, and even Josephina, who’d been cooing softly, went silent. She seemed to be staring at the spectacle, too.

“I don’t want to hear anything about cotton candy or Glinda the Good Witch or…or Martians,” Priscilla said as she descended. Carefully—probably because she couldn’t see her feet. “Not one word.”

Tony whistled. “Do you have to get permission from Pepto-Bismol to wear that color?”

Roark bit his lip. He had to admit, the bridesmaid’s gown was a ghastly hue.

He hadn’t expected Priscilla to show up for their first—and possibly only—date in curlers, either. Pink plastic rollers like his mother used to wear. He didn’t see why she had to resort to such extreme measures. Her natural hair, straight and thick and the most gorgeous dark honey color, didn’t need any improvement.

Priscilla finally looked at Roark, and what she saw almost made her miss a step. Roark, holding a baby as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She felt an unexpected contraction in the vicinity of her womb. And the way Roark was looking at her, as if she were a mountain of strawberry ice cream and he was hot fudge, didn’t help matters. She had thought the curlers would put him off.

She pulled herself together. “Hi, Roark. There’s still time to change your mind.”

Roark shook his head. “Not a chance. I want to see you actually wearing that dress. It’s bigger than you.”

“And it weighs more than my turnout gear.”

“I think it makes you look like Cinderella,” said Jasmine, who loved all things pink and girlie. She had begged Priscilla to model the dress when she’d brought it home a few days earlier.

Priscilla spared a smile for the girl. “Thank you, Jasmine. But, remember, it’s not the dress that makes the princess.”

“I know, it’s the inner princess,” Samantha said with a giggle.

Priscilla ruffled the girl’s dark mop of hair, then grabbed a couple of bulging shopping bags sitting near the bottom of the stairs. She looked at Roark. “Are we taking Josephina with us?”

“Oh, um, no.” He handed the baby to Tony, then focused his attention back on Priscilla. “You ready?” He had to raise his voice to be heard over Josephina’s renewed screams.

“I know I don’t look ready. But Marisa has a legion of makeup artists and hair torturers waiting for me at the church.”

Priscilla was momentarily taken aback once again when she saw Roark’s car—a red Porsche. “Quite a step up from the black Suburban.”

“That’s my work car. This is my play car.”

Pretty nice toy, Priscilla thought as she stuffed her shopping bags, containing shoes and other accessories, in the tiny trunk. Where was she going to put the dress? The car didn’t have a backseat to speak of. “We need a sidecar for the dress.”

“I think all three of us will fit.” He gallantly opened the passenger door, then held the dress while Priscilla got herself situated. He gently draped the dress over her, though he had to try three times before he was able to stuff the mountain of pink chiffon inside.

And then they were off, Roark deftly maneuvering his macho machine through the twilight of an early fall evening. The weather was magnificent, with just a touch of chill in the air. Priscilla wished she could enjoy it. But she was too tense. The next few hours were going to be tedious. Marisa and her mother would be walking, talking high-anxiety machines while eight bridesmaids—eight!—tried to do makeup and hair and change their clothes in that tiny bride’s room.

Priscilla didn’t like pandemonium, especially when she had no chance of controlling or organizing things. She would be at the mercy of her family. And Roark would get to see it all.

He would probably run for the hills.

“Okay,” she said when the silence had stretched too long. “I’ve been thinking about this, and here’s the story. In case someone asks how we met, how long we’ve been dating, that sort of thing.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s keep it simple. We met a couple weeks ago, when you were called to a fire that I worked. You asked me some questions about the fire, then you asked me out to dinner the next night and we’ve been seeing each other ever since.”

“Where did we go on our first date?” he asked. “Everyone always asks that.”

“Um…We went out for pizza.”

“I could do better than that. How about we went to Newport’s?” Newport’s was one of Dallas’s best seafood restaurants.

“Too dressy for a first date. How about Havana Nights?” Havana Nights was a hot new Cuban restaurant in Bishop Arts.

“Done. Are we serious?”

“Our relationship, you mean? It has potential to be serious,” she said carefully.

“Do we hear wedding bells?”

Priscilla’s heart skipped a beat. “You don’t have to take it that far. Do you know where you’re going, by the way?”

“To that humongous church in Highland Park? The one that looks like a medieval cathedral, complete with gargoyles?”

“That’s the one. You’ve been there?”

“Actually, I got married there.”

“You’ve been married?” she blurted out. She wasn’t sure why that surprised her. A man as good-looking as he was seldom reached his midthirties without at least one trip to the altar.

“Only for a couple of years, when I was younger.”

“Were there children?” The image of Roark holding Josephina flashed through her mind.

“No.”

She gathered by his clipped answer that she might have touched on a sensitive issue.