Alice Sharpe - Wife On His Doorstep

Chapter One

John Vermont, owner and acting captain of the stern-wheeler Ruby Rose, didn’t like marrying people. For one thing, seeing as he currently spent most of his time ashore, he was sorely out of practice, which meant that instead of reciting the vows in his deep baritone—which could, when he wanted, scare an oyster off a rock—he had to read them from the manual. For another, face it, he didn’t really believe in marriage—personal experience had taught him the term “wedded bliss” was an oxymoron.

Take the couple standing in front of him now. Within the next few minutes John would pronounce them husband and wife, yet he couldn’t help but wonder if they had any idea what they were getting into.

The groom was a man about his own age, sporting an out-of-season tan and a twelve-hundred-dollar tuxedo. Earlier, before the ceremony, John had seen the guy strutting around the deck, acting like he owned the boat, a crowd of cronies following in his wake, laughing at his jokes, smiling into his eyes while he puffed out his chest and ate it up.

The bride was a good five or six years younger than the groom—still in her twenties. She had sassy blond hair cut short around her ears, a lithe figure, and huge blue eyes filled with doubts. She used those eyes to cast furtive glances at the man she was marrying, glances of which the groom seemed totally unaware, glances that seemed to say “Just a second, let me rethink this!”

Made you wonder why she was marrying him.

Judging from what John had heard, money was the likely answer. Mrs. Colpepper, the new events coordinator John had hired after the old one ran away with the thenacting captain of this boat, had mentioned that the groom was footing the bill for the wedding. Lobster and champagne for one hundred and fifty didn’t come cheaply. Nor did the well-known band tuning up its instruments on the lower deck or the hundreds of flowers fluttering their petals in the freshening breeze.

Just another pretty woman marrying another rich clown for all the wrong reasons. Boy, did that bring back the memories!

Running a finger down the page, John discovered it was time to remind everyone that marriage was not an institution to be entered into lightly. How was that for a novel idea? The bride bit her lip as he spoke and, raising her eyes, she gazed at him. He almost felt as though he should pause to reassure her, but he wasn’t the reassuring kind. At six-three and one hundred and ninety solid pounds, he was too big; his features, though regular enough, were too weathered by his predilection for the outdoors, his manner too brusque. Women tended to find him threatening. Truth of the matter was, the feeling was entirely mutual.

He cast out the next line, giving it all he had. “If there is anyone here who knows of a reason why these two shouldn’t be married, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.”

In the bottom of his black little heart, he always kind of hoped someone would come forward at this point—it would at least break the monotony. As usual, however, no one did.

Correction: no person did. Foggy Dew, the ship’s cat, made a sudden appearance. John had taken pity on her when he’d come aboard less than a month before and found her on the dock, knocked up and abandoned. She’d repaid him by shedding on his clothes, sleeping on his bunk and, generally speaking, taking over the ship. Now, as he watched, she waddled deliberately around and about the chairs filled with prosperous-looking wedding guests, steering clear of Mrs. Colpepper, who had forcefully declared her dislike of cats, pregnant ones in particular.

Like a good captain, he struggled to keep his mind on the ceremony, though he was aware the cat had paused between the bridal couple to sniff at the hem of the woman’s dress. She glanced down at Foggy Dew, her features relaxing perceptibly. The cat meowed, and a smile—the first John had seen—touched the bride’s lips, lit her eyes and transformed her face from simple beauty to breath-stopping perfection.

For no clear reason John suddenly found his tongue getting in the way of the words, a condition he quickly remedied with a stern clearing of his throat. As he continued, he noted that Foggy Dew, having conquered the bride, had moved on to inspect the groom, who cast a scowl at the cat and then at John. With a nonchalant shrug, John tried to say, “Lighten up, mister, she’ll go away in a second.”

The groom didn’t seem to get the message. He tried scooting Foggy Dew away with a stiff leg, but perversely, this seemed to make the cat even more determined to win his affection. Purring loudly now, she rubbed her chin along the man’s shoe. John could feel Mrs. Colpepper’s gaze drilling holes in his head as she waited for him to make the cat cease and desist, but doing that would mean stopping the ceremony and that might mean starting over again at the beginning. This was out of the question seeing as he was almost at the end. So he did the only thing he could think to do—he spoke faster.

Besides, the episode was not without a lighter side. Take the bride, for instance. She’d stopped looking uneasy and was instead smiling at the cat, a definite improvement. Even the guests, stuffed shirts that most of them seemed to be, were smiling at the incongruity of a cat aboard a boat inviting itself to a wedding. Heck, the kid recording the ceremony for posterity was grinning, too. Chances were someday this obnoxious groom would look at the video and think a cat showing up was kind of cute.

John moved on to the next part, fighting to place a solemn yet serene look upon his face. The vows, all those little words and repetitions that promised love and fidelity, sometimes stuck in his throat.

As the bride said her lines, she looked him straight in the eye. Normally, in his experience, a woman looked at her husband-to-be at a time like this and not at the captain of the vessel. He glanced down at the manual to find her name, which Mrs. Colpepper had penciled in the margin, then he looked back at her. “Do you, Megan Ashley Morison—” he began. The use of her name seemed to shake her, as though until that second she’d been kidding herself into thinking it was someone else standing at this seaboard altar, someone else promising to cleave herself only unto the groom.

In fact, her demeanor was so unusual that by the time she whispered, “I do,” John was surprised—and oddly disappointed—she’d gone through with it.

Now it was time to address the groom, one Robert Winslow, who was still fidgeting because of the cat. As John asked him to repeat his vows, Foggy Dew finally gave up and settled down into a lumpy mass of fur at the guy’s feet, so it was hard to figure why instead of just saying “I do” and moving away, Winslow chose that second to act. With a sneer and a grunt, the man kicked the cat.

John watched in stunned silence as a gray blur of fur, two wild yellow eyes, and twenty extended claws hurled toward him, and though he quickly knelt to intercept her, he was too late. She flew between the railing and the deck and landed with a splash in the river twenty feet below.

Almost immediately, the bride was at the rail, her bouquet of roses and lilies dropped in haste. John, at the rail seconds before her, was marking the animal’s location by lining her up with an outcrop of rock on the shoreline when Megan Morison grabbed his arm. “What can I do?”

The hush that had at first descended was suddenly filled with shocked voices, including Mrs. Colpepper’s, who was demanding the ceremony continue.

John took Megan’s hand and pulled her away from the rail. “Come with me.”

“Now wait just a second—” Winslow began, but by then John was racing toward the stairs leading down, Megan’s hand still in his. On the lower deck, which was decorated to the hilt but devoid of passengers except for the band and the ship’s caterers who were setting up for the reception, he released Megan and pulled a life ring with an attached line from a bulkhead.