“All right!” Juliet dropped her head to her hands. “All right. If just to shut the two of you up.”
“Hah.” Nikki smiled, all good humor again as she elbowed Cassandra. “We cracked her. You said it might take margaritas.”
“For God’s sake, Nikki, we don’t want to give away our plague-the-sister strategies,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me, Froot Loop—”
“Please stop calling me that.”
Nikki’s expression turned sly. “Why? Because it’s Gabe’s pet name for you?”
Juliet leaned forward, eager to nurture this new topic of conversation. “Yes, speaking of things a person is itching to find out…”
The two younger sisters stilled, then turned on her as one. “Nice try, but no banana,” Nikki said.
Cassandra flipped a handful of wavy hair behind her right shoulder and then nodded. “We just want to help, Juliet. At the book party, what Noah said, help us understand…”
Noah. She tried pushing the man out of her mind, but it wasn’t working. Wayne was there, too, front and center. “I can’t believe they’d conspire to keep me away when my husband needed me most.” The words tumbled out.
She rose from the couch, her voice rising, too, but she couldn’t seem to modulate her tone. “It makes me furious to realize just exactly how frail they considered me to be.” She held out her arms. “Do I look like a puff of air would blow me over?”
Cassandra appeared to think about it. “Well, kind of. No! No! Don’t get all huffy. It’s just that you do have that ethereal blonde thing going on. It’s natural for people to respond to that in a certain way.”
“And I don’t think you’ve been eating enough,” Nikki added. “I should make you a big dish of enchiladas.”
Juliet dropped back to her seat, still frustrated. “Mexican food is not going to solve anything. As for people naturally responding to my kind of looks—these were two men who knew me. How could they have—What are you doing?”
She broke off as Nikki jumped from the couch to drag the oversized cutout of Wayne from the back room and over to the couches. Propped against the coffee table, all nine feet of him stared down at the three of them.
Nikki eyed the man right back, her arms crossed over her chest. “Just looking at him, he makes me want to enlist,” she said. “Either that or confess I cheated on my U.S. History midterm exam.”
Juliet could almost smile. “He had a way about him like that.”
“So you knew him then,” Nikki said.
“Of course.”
“Like you wished he’d known you.”
She narrowed her eyes at the other woman. “What are you getting at?”
“I hate to break big news, Juliet, but the man was old. Handsome and sexy, I’ll give you that, yet of an entirely different generation. And he was a military man. A commander.”
“But old,” Juliet said wryly. Her elegant silver fox.
“Well, if you’re aware of so much, can’t you see that he very likely thought—as a man of his generation and inclination—that it was his duty to protect you? Hadn’t he always tried to do that?”
“To a fault, yes, but he was dying, surely that meant—”
“I’ll tell you something I know about people and about dying. I watched my mother die, my father, too. Nothing changes about a person when they come to their last days. The funny ones still make jokes, and the private ones don’t suddenly reveal their souls.”
Cassandra slid down the couch to move closer to Juliet as Nikki continued.
“If you ask me, the choices your husband made at the end of his life tell us something about him—that he was a proud and caring man—but they don’t tell us anything about you.”
Cassandra picked up the thread. “Nikki’s right. They don’t say that you’re anything less than a woman loved with devotion by a well-intentioned, but perhaps pigheaded man.”
Juliet stared at Cassandra, then shifted her gaze to Nikki. Were they right, that this wasn’t about Juliet so much as it was about what Wayne needed to do for himself? And if so, how could her sisters possibly understand something so clearly that Juliet hadn’t realized on her own?
But wasn’t that what family did? she mused, looking up at Wayne’s masterful—oh, yes, and macho-to-the-core—image. Family could offer up clarity because they cared. Her gaze drifted back to the two other women. She’d risked forging a bond with them to gain everything that was written across their faces at this moment: warmth, loyalty, caring.