Mary Mcbride - Bluer Than Velvet

Since he couldn’t marry her in kindergarten, he’d waited until their graduation from high school to ask her. She’d put him off, and then put him off again when they graduated from college. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to marry him. She did. She swore she did. But Jenny had her own itinerary. She wanted to go as far as she could as a concert pianist before settling in as Sam’s wife. And she thought she had all the time in the world. They both did.

His gaze lit on the Divisional boxing trophy he’d won in the Corps. When Jenny moved to Los Angeles to study with the renowned pianist, Hermoine Stahl, it made perfect sense for Sam to enlist in the Marine Corps because Camp Pendleton was just a few hours away from L.A. Later, when Jenny moved to Paris, he pulled a string or two in order to be assigned embassy duty there. Wherever Jenny went, he followed. It had been whither thou goest in reverse.

When Jenny acquired a rampant case of stage fright that prevented her from performing, he’d resigned from the Corps and followed her back here where he’d run for county sheriff, winning in a surprising landslide. But even then, Jenny wouldn’t marry him. She needed to prove she could play on stage, if only one more time.

And then, on an icy stretch of Highway A-14, Jenny’s time had run out.

It was light enough now for Sam’s eyes to trace all the hairline cracks in the ceiling. He wondered how many men his age had only loved one woman in their lives, and of those how many had only made love to one woman. Damned few, he decided.

While Jenny was alive, he’d been oblivious to other women. In the two years since her death, he’d been both oblivious and numb. Then suddenly Laura McNeal had waltzed out of the Yellow Pages and into his office in her little blue velvet scrap of a dress, and had lit a fire in him that Sam didn’t like one bit.

He sat up now, rubbing nonexistent sleep out of his eyes. He should’ve known better than to offer to help the woman. But, since he had, he was going to help her with a vengeance. Help her right out of his life.

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