Stephanie Doyle - Suspect Lover

“Dearly beloved. We are gathered here today to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony. To create, before God and guests, a family.”

Mark glanced down at Nora’s butt and smiled. “Psst. Glad you didn’t get stuck with the bow.”

“Shhh,” she said. “I’m trying to pay attention. That’s my brother up there.”

“This is the boring the part,” he told her. “It doesn’t get good until the end.”

This time she jabbed him in the ribs to shut him up. As her official date for this shindig, he supposed he had to take it.

“Do you, Caroline, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do.”

“Ah, gee,” Mark whispered. “She’s crying.”

“Of course she’s crying. She loves him,” Nora hiccupped into a tissue.

“And do you, Dominic, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

“I do.”

“If he cries I’m outta here.”

“If you don’t shut up, you’ve got about a zero chance of getting hot wedding sex tonight.” Nora gave him a final glare.

Mark took the threat seriously and quickly shut up. Although he didn’t see what the big deal was. It wasn’t as if these two hadn’t been married before.

He got the gist of the event. Caroline loved Dominic. Dominic loved Caroline. And if that bump in the front of Caroline’s wedding dress was any indication, it’s not as if they had waited for wedding number two to get busy.

But wedding sex was wedding sex, and no man put that at risk. Add to that that this was going to be their first time and they were going to blow the doors and windows off the hotel room. Yep, no reason to rock that boat.

So he listened as the minister said the final words talking about what God had joined that no man could put asunder and so forth and so on. It was definitely a nice thing. Marriage. And in thirty or forty years, he definitely might give it a try.

Nora sniffed again and again, wiping her nose with the tissue. His eyes were drawn to the faint red mark that he remembered noticing the first time they met and he suddenly realized that he was looking at an old nose piercing. Huh.

Instantly his mind flashed to what else might have been pierced. Or more importantly, what still might be. Shortcake was always going to be a surprise.

Thirty or forty years? Maybe ten or twenty.

a dedicated romance reader, began writing her own romantic stories, some funny, some adventurous, but all delivering the quintessential happy ending, at age fifteen. At eighteen she submitted her first story to Harlequin Books and by twenty-six she was published. Now in her thirties, she struggles between the demands of her “day” job, her writing and trying to find a little romance of her own. She lives in South Jersey with her two cats, Alexandria Hamilton and Theodora Roosevelt. She wants to get a dog, but the cats have outvoted her.