“I hope you do let me help; I’d forgotten how much I love weddings.” She laughed, one of the best and happiest laughs I’d ever heard from her. She was usually pretty stern and uncompromising. I tried to picture that girlish laugh from the Rosita I knew, who was five-eight and last I’d seen her well over three hundred pounds. Manny was still lean and shorter than her, so that they looked like the Jack Sprat nursery rhyme. The laugh belonged to that young slip of a girl that Manny had met in Mexico long ago.
“So no issues with me marrying a vampire?” I asked, because I couldn’t leave it alone.
She made a harsh sound. “I am a devout Catholic, you know that.”
“I do, and since the Church declared all vampires soulless and damned, I thought you might have an issue with my fiancé.”
“They also declared all who raise the dead excommunicated, but our priest still gives Manny communion, even though he would get in trouble if they knew, so perhaps your man is a good one, too, even though the Church says otherwise.”
This was so open-minded for Rosita that I didn’t know whether to applaud or ask her what self-help group she’d been going to. Wisely, I did neither.
“Besides, it is not just any vampire, it is Jean-Claude, and he is . . .” She seemed to search for words, and finally settled for, “hermoso.”
I laughed, because it didn’t mean just “beautiful” here in America, but someone who was amazing in some way that went beyond beauty. “I’ll tell him you said so.”
“Oh, do not do that, Anita.” She sounded flustered; I couldn’t quite picture Rosita flustered.
“Okay, I won’t, but I will tell him you’re happy for us.”
“Yes, do, I cannot wait to see the wedding that will match such a proposal.”
“Me, either,” I said, and again the tight knot in my stomach wasn’t about crime-fighting. The proposal had raised the bar too high, and now everyone would be looking for the wedding to top it, and nothing was going to top Jean-Claude in full prince-sweeping-you-off-your-feet mode, not even Jean-Claude.
We said our good-byes, and then I was in the car with Nathaniel and the sound of the wheels on the night-black road. “Manny’s wife can’t wait to see the wedding that matches such a proposal, she said.”
“It was something,” Nathaniel said, and his voice was very careful. It made me look at him and study that so-serious profile.
“What did that mean?” I asked.
“What did what mean?”
“That tone of voice and the bland phrase?”
He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Are we close to the cemetery yet?”
“Another four, five miles, and then slow down, the entrance is easy to miss in the dark. But you’re not changing the subject.”
“You’re already upset tonight, and I’m being silly.”
“Silly about what?” I asked.
“I’d have been thrilled if someone had tried to sweep me off my feet for a proposal the way Jean-Claude did for you, but men never get the big gesture aimed at them. They always have to do the big gesture.”
I studied the side of his face. “Are you saying that you want a big, fancy proposal?”
“I’m saying it would be nice to be the girl once in a while.”
“You already do most of the domestic stuff, and you’re the one who wants a baby. I think you’re better at a lot of the traditional girl things than I am.”
“Then if I’m the girl, why don’t I get a big, fancy proposal?”
“Are you serious?”
He gave me a look that said, with no uncertainty, that he was. Shit.
“Just me making the gesture, or me and Micah?”
“Either Micah, or you, or both of you, I don’t care as long as you mean it.”
“Micah proposed to both of us at the same time. I would marry you both if I could, I’ve said that.”
“I know, and I told you it was silly.”
“So if Jean-Claude had pulled up in front of you in a horse-drawn carriage with the huge-ass ring, you’d have loved it?”
He nodded. “Yeah, well if it were you and/or Micah, yes.”
“Well, fuck.”
“That is not quite the romantic sentiment I was hoping for, Anita.”
“I’m sorry, really, but you just caught me off guard.”
“You said yourself, I do most of the cooking and cleaning, grocery shopping, and you won’t get pregnant for me, so is it too much to ask for a little romance?”
“I am a U.S. Marshal with the Preternatural Branch; I can’t do my job pregnant, and I don’t want to be pregnant. I can’t see my life working with a baby in it.”
“We could adopt.”
“You’re only twenty-three; why do you want a child now?”
“But you’re thirty, and I want to have a child with you.”
“I’ve got a few good years left in me,” I said, and didn’t try to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
“Thirty isn’t old, Anita, I know that, but for a woman to have babies, early thirties is decision time.”
“Women have babies into their forties, or even fifties,” I said.
“That’s with medical technology helping out.”
“My aunt had her last baby at fifty and it was a total surprise, no medical miracles involved.”
He glanced at me. “Really?”