Kitabı oku: «You're Marrying Her?»

Chapter One

The wedding dress glowed in the late-afternoon sunlight streaming through the plate-glass windows of the small shop. Sequins formed a delicate tracery of vines on the bodice. A cluster of palest pink silk roses gathered the back of the full satin skirt into the faintest hint of a bustle. It was a Cinderella dress, symbolic of the bride’s hopes for a happily-ever-after future with Prince Charming. Next week, a young woman would walk down the aisle in this dress and pledge the rest of her life to the man of her dreams.

Samantha Gillespie shuddered.

The reaction was involuntary. She really had nothing against marriage, Sam told herself as she studied the dress on the dais before her. It just wasn’t something she wanted to do right now. Or any time soon. She was only twenty-four, for heaven’s sake, and no matter what her mother said, Sam wasn’t ready to get married yet. Not when life held such an endless array of possibilities. Why would she want to give that up for marriage?

“Well?” a voice demanded impatiently from the back of the shop. “Have you finished it?”

Sam glanced over her shoulder at the petite woman standing in the doorway of the small office at the far end of the showroom. “Almost,” Sam told her sister. “I think it needs a few more clusters of roses at the back.”

“For heaven’s sake!” Dressed in a pastel-pink suit and frilly white blouse, Jeanette glared over the top of her chunky, black-rimmed reading glasses, her lips pursed. Samantha recognized the expression—and the suit. She’d tried to get Jeanette to wear something less insipid, more contemporary, but her sister refused to cooperate. “I can’t wear that stuff you wear,” Jeanette always said.

Which was completely unfair, Sam thought, tightening the knot of the shirt tied at her waist and smoothing her ancient blue jeans. The casual look might not suit Jeanette, but a deep red suit with a tailored cut would flatter her dark hair and eyes and make the most of her pleasingly plump figure.

“Why don’t you let me make you a new suit?” Sam wheedled, ignoring Jeanette’s disapproving expression. “We got in some red linen that would look gorgeous on you.”

“No, thank you.” Jeanette’s toe, in a dull pink pump, tapped a stern tattoo. “I would prefer you worry about Miss Blogden’s gown rather than my attire. She and her mother are supposed to be here in half an hour. Mrs. Blogden will be furious if the dress isn’t finished.”

“Don’t worry.” Samantha retrieved a sewing kit and some pink silk from an antique armoire, then returned to the dais where the dress in question was reflected in a three-way mirror. “It won’t take me long.”

“Good grief, Sam!” Jeanette advanced from the office to the hat stand in the middle of the room—a more strategic spot for lecturing. “Must you always wait until the last minute? You know what Mrs. Blogden’s like.”

Sam sighed. Besides wearing boring clothes, Jeanette’s favorite activity was to lecture Sam on her habit of procrastinating. Sam listened sometimes, and even made sporadic efforts to change, but somehow her bad habits always crept back.

“Don’t worry,” Sam said again. “The dress will be ready.” Kneeling beside the mannequin, she twirled a piece of silk into a rose shape and stitched it onto the skirt of the wedding gown.

Jeanette chewed her lip. “I hate to leave you alone with her, but I promised Matt I’d come home early tonight.”

“Oh?” Sam glanced sideways at her sister. “How is Matt?”

Jeanette’s expression closed up. “He’s fine,” she said shortly.

Sam didn’t press. She knew Jeanette and her husband had been arguing a lot lately, but Jeanette was as unrevealing as her suit when it came to talking about her marriage. Sam hoped the couple found some way to resolve their problems—for the sake of their three children if nothing else.

“Go on then,” Sam told her. “Go home. Don’t worry about Mrs. Blogden.”

“I can’t help worrying about Mrs. Blogden,” Jeanette muttered. “I can’t afford to lose any clients.” She straightened a veil on the hat stand. “By the way, Brad Rivers called half an hour ago. He wanted to talk to you.”

“Brad?” Sam’s thimble fell to the floor and rolled off the dais, but she paid no attention. “What did he want?”

“If you’d been here on time, you would know.”

Sam rolled her eyes at her sister’s back as Jeanette retreated into her office. “Did he say anything?” she called after her.

“Not really.” Jeanette’s muffled voice floated out. “Just that he would call again later.”

How odd. Sam crouched down to look for her thimble. She’d barely talked to Brad since Christmas, eight months ago. She’d just returned to Southern California after a two-year absence, and when she arrived—late—at her mother’s house, she’d been delighted to see him. Only he hadn’t been so happy to see her. He’d been stiff, almost unfriendly. She’d thought at first that her long absence was responsible for his behavior. But as the day wore on and he didn’t loosen up, she’d realized something else was bothering him. She’d asked him flat out what was wrong, but he’d said everything was fine.

She’d called him several times over the next several months and left messages, but some barrier remained. When he’d made some excuse not to come to Easter dinner, everyone in her family had been surprised. He’d spent every holiday with them since Samantha was fourteen. And suddenly he couldn’t come because of “pressing demands at work”?

Hurt and confused, she’d stopped calling. He hadn’t made any effort to contact her. Until today.

Sam frowned at the rose she’d just sewn into place. What could he want to talk to her about now, after ignoring her for so long?

Jeanette came back out of her office with her purse and a stack of magazines. “Here are the latest bridal magazines. And something else I thought you’d like to see.”

She held up a tabloid newspaper and Sam stared at the picture on the cover of a man splaying his hand outward in an effort to block his face from the camera.

Is This Man Too Good to Be True? screamed the headline.

In spite of his outstretched hand, Sam recognized him immediately. “Brad?” She reached for the tabloid. “Does this have something to do with why he called me?”

“Maybe.” Jeanette held the magazine out of Sam’s reach and flipped through the pages. “It says that he’s selling RiversWare for $100 million and giving half the profits to his employees. Can you believe that?”

“He always was generous.” Absently, Sam sewed another rose on the dress. “But what does that have to do with me?”

“It says in here somewhere…oh, here it is, listen to this—‘although Rivers declined to be interviewed for this article, a reliable source tells us that he plans to use the money to convince his sweetheart to marry him!”’ Jeanette lowered the newspaper and stared at Samantha. “He must mean you, Sammy.”

Sam pricked her finger with the needle. Swearing under her breath, she sucked at the spot of blood before it could stain the white satin. “You’re crazy. Brad and I were never interested in each other. We were just friends.”

Jeanette snorted. “What guy is friends with a girl? Brad was in love with you.”

“No, he wasn’t. He was in love with Blanche Milken, remember?”

“Ha. He never cared about Blanche the way he did about you. He wasn’t the same after you and Maria Vasquez left on that wild road trip cross-country—and you should have seen his face when Mom told him that you’d decided to go backpacking across Europe!”

“You should have seen his face when he saw me last Christmas!” Sam retorted. “The rocks at Stonehenge had more expression. He was not welcoming home his long-lost love, believe me.”

“You always were blind about Brad. But I don’t have time to argue with you. I’ve got to run.” Jeanette set the magazines and tabloid on the floor. “It’s past six o’clock. Come lock the door after I leave.”

Sam automatically complied—Jeanette worried about Sam being alone in the shop after hours—then returned to where she’d been sitting, her brow furrowed. Blind about Brad? That wasn’t true. Sam had known him better than anyone.

Her gaze drifted to the stack of magazines. The tabloid rested on top. Slowly, she picked up the newspaper and opened it. Inside was another picture, although the caption identified this one as being five years old. Brad stood with his hands shoved in the pants pockets of his ill-fitting brown polyester suit, his shoulders slightly hunched. His gray-blue eyes, the color obscured by the glasses he wore, gazed off into the distance as if contemplating some thorny dilemma.

Samantha smiled a little. She remembered that suit—he’d bought it at a thrift shop to wear to graduation. She recognized his pose, too—it was so typically Brad. The first time she’d seen him, when he moved in with his grandmother down the street from her parents’ house, he’d been standing exactly the same way. He’d been seventeen, a senior in high school, quiet and serious. Only fourteen herself, she hadn’t seen much of him until one day at school when she came upon some of the jocks—including her boyfriend, Pete—picking on him. Indignantly, she’d told them to knock it off.

Pete had been annoyed—he’d broken up with her a week later—but she hadn’t really cared. She hadn’t liked having a boyfriend, it was too restricting. But after that, she’d run into Brad a lot more often, and one day she impulsively invited him and his grandmother to Thanksgiving dinner. Her mother, whose rather abrasive personality was offset by her deep-seated maternal instincts, had taken him under her wing once she heard the story of how his parents and sister had been killed in a car crash. Brad—and his grandmother, before her death—had become part of the family.

Samantha put down the tabloid and sewed two more silk roses into place on the Blogden wedding dress. Even after Brad graduated and went to college, their friendship had continued and deepened. He’d helped her with some of her classes, and she’d made him laugh with her tales of trying to correct the fashion faux pas of her friends. He’d been one of the few people she could really talk to. She’d poured out her troubles and he’d always listened, ever sympathetic, ever patient. He wasn’t like the boys in high school, the ones who got possessive after she dated them a few times. She’d always been able to count on Brad. She’d thought that they would be friends forever.

His behavior this last Christmas had come as a rude shock. Although she’d tried to pretend nothing was amiss, she’d been uneasy all evening. She’d drunk a little too much wine and chattered too much, acutely aware of his quietness, his stiffness, his stillness. She’d gotten the impression he wanted nothing to do with her, an impression reinforced by his reaction to her phone calls.

Frowning, Sam knotted and snipped the thread. So why did he want to talk to her now?

Brad was in love with you.

Jeanette’s words echoed in Sam’s brain. Automatically, she shook her head. Brad in love with her? The idea was laughable. They’d never even gone out on a date, let alone discussed marriage.

Well, okay, that wasn’t strictly true. They had discussed it, the summer she’d graduated from high school. But only in the general sense. He’d asked her if she ever wanted to get married.

“Not until I’m really old,” she’d said. “Thirty, at least.” They’d ridden their bikes along Santa Monica Boulevard to the beach—her mother didn’t like her to go alone—and she’d been sitting in the warm sand, under a strategically placed umbrella. Wearing a new polka-dot bikini, she’d been anxiously surveying her pale skin for signs of any new freckles.

Giving up on the inspection, she’d glanced up to find him staring at her. He’d looked away quickly, picking up a bottle of sunscreen.

“How about you?” She watched furtively as he rubbed the lotion onto his chest, the liquid mixing with the sprinkling of hair that had sprouted there in the last year or so. She wondered why he bothered. His skin browned easily, in spite of his light brown hair and gray-blue eyes.

“Yes. Someday.” His elbows stuck up in the air as he applied lotion to his back. The muscles in his chest and arms—more defined than she remembered from the previous summer—rippled as he did so. “I want children. And a wife to come home to every night.”

Sam wrinkled her nose. “Sounds boring. I want to travel. I want excitement. I want…” She looked up at the bright, cloudless blue sky, groping for words.

A seagull glided in the air, circling the beach, searching, waiting for an opportunity to swoop down and snatch some delicious morsel.

“You want what?” Brad asked.

The seagull dived. Descending with speed and grace, it focused completely on its target. Sam could imagine the wind rushing through its feathers, almost feel the bird’s excitement as it swooped down, the rush of anticipation as it approached its goal.

The bird landed by a trash can. It pecked at the sandy remnants of a greasy, half-eaten hamburger. The prize secure in its beak, the seagull took off again.

Sam lay down on her towel and closed her eyes. “I don’t know what I want yet,” she told Brad. “But I will.”

But now six years had passed, she was twenty-four, and she still didn’t have a clue.

Shaking her head, Sam put her needle and thread back in the sewing box and closed the lid. Maybe it was time she got a real job. She’d taken a couple of accounting classes before she quit college and had plenty of accounts receivable-payable experience both in the U.S. and in Europe. She should be able to find work fairly easily.

Or she could go back to college. She’d been considering that for the last year or so. She could finish her business degree while living off her share of the small trust fund her father had left. It would support her comfortably, if not luxuriously, while she studied.

Or she could continue to work for her sister. At least for a while. She’d taken the job with Jeanette partly to help out her sister, partly because she enjoyed working in the shop. But she knew Jeanette couldn’t really afford to keep her on long-term. Sam needed to make some decision soon. Hopefully before Jeanette became completely fed up with her lack of punctuality and fired her.

A knock sounded at the door. Sam glanced at her watch. Seven o’clock—Mrs. Blogden had said she and her daughter would be at the shop by six-thirty. Jeanette should have stayed and lectured them, Sam thought. Although, of course, Jeanette would never criticize a client. Only sisters enjoyed that privilege.

The knock came again.

Reluctantly she stood up, fluffing up her curls and brushing the stray bits of thread and cloth from her shirt and jeans. She picked up the stack of magazines and put them in the armoire before walking toward the door.

Another knock sounded, more impatient this time.

“Hold on to your horses,” Samantha muttered, but she arranged her features in a smile as she opened the door. “Your dress is ready.…”

The man standing on the threshold arched an eyebrow, his gray-blue eyes smiling down at her.

“You always did have a peculiar idea of me, Sammy.”