Dixie Browning - Cinderella's Midnight Kiss

“Uncle Henry gave me my own car! I can’t believe it! Now instead of bicycling all over town to do my Monday errands, I can drive. Maybe I should paint a sign on the side—something like Send Cindy, She’s Fast, Reliable and Cheap.

“Aunt S. would have a hissy-fit.”

Her uncle had died before her next birthday. She still missed him. “I think Aunt S. knows anyway,” Cindy had written all those years ago. “The reason she doesn’t say anything is because then she might have to give me an allowance to buy the stuff I absolutely have to have. I’ve done my best to earn my keep all these years by making myself useful, but I’ll tell you this much, Diary. I might end up an old maid, but no way will I ever let Maura or Steff fix me up with another blind date. The one last month nearly tore my dress off. The one last week told dirty jokes and laughed when I blushed, and last night’s date was so boring I nearly fell asleep while he was telling me about every job he ever held, from bag boy right on up to produce manager. I might not be rich or well-bred or pretty, but I deserve better than that.”

That was one thing that hadn’t changed, Cindy told herself, laying the diary aside again. She deserved whatever she could make of her life. Once Steff’s wedding was over, she was going to find a tiny apartment she could afford and turn her Monday job into a full-time thing until she saved enough to launch her dream career. One day, women would go back to wearing gorgeous, feminine, romantic hats, and when that happened, she would be ready.

If she still had enough energy left after this blasted wedding!

John Hale Hitchcock quietly hung up the phone and began to swear. He’d finally said yes, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have serious reservations. All his adult life he’d made it a policy to stay as far away from weddings as possible in case they were contagious. Especially weddings that required his active participation. What was it the shrinks called it? A defense mechanism?

Yeah, it was that and more.

He’d always had a feeling his own parents hated each other’s guts, but were far too well bred to mention it. Add to that his mother’s sporadic attempts to pair him up with one of her colleagues and it was no wonder he’d developed a jaded outlook on marriage.

He’d eventually learned to handle such things tactfully. In spite of his parents’ dismay when he’d chosen engineering over law, Georgia Tech over Yale, he wasn’t a barbarian. At least he’d had the good manners not to come right out and admit to harboring a deep-seated aversion to pinstripes, brogans and button-down brains, a description that summed up those among his mother’s younger female colleagues who considered her a role model. Now a highly esteemed federal judge, Janet Hale Hitchcock had never, not even in her junior-partner days, been a hands-on type mother.

Once she’d given up trying to hand over control of her only son to one of her right-minded colleagues, her matchmaking efforts had ceased. Now it was only his married friends who were forever trying to pair him up. Hitch put it down to the theory that misery liked company. His method of dealing with it was both tactful and efficient. Smile politely and run like hell. Having spent his formative years under the thumbs of domineering parents, in a home that had all the warmth of a refrigerator truck, he wasn’t about to get caught in the marriage trap.

Mac’s call had caught him at a weak moment. He’d just come back from a memorial service for another old classmate, dead of heart failure at the age of thirty-three, a year younger than Mac.

Life was risky business.

After pouring himself a drink, Hitch had been wallowing in a rare moment of philosophical nostalgia when Mac MacCollum had called to tell him about his upcoming wedding and ask him to act as best man.

“No thanks, my friend. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m severely allergic to weddings.”

“Aw, come on, Hitch, you’re my closest pal. I couldn’t ask anyone else.”

The two men had gone through four years at Georgia Tech together, Hitch on a football scholarship as his parents, both Yale law school graduates, had refused to condone such heresy. The day after graduation Mac and Hitch had joined the army together. Mac had then tried on half a dozen careers, while Hitch went to Harvard for his MBA. Through it all they’d never lost contact, due mostly to Mac’s friendly persistence.

“You know, Mac,” Hitch had remarked, “whining was never one of your more attractive traits.”

“I’m not whining, man, I’m begging. Begging has more dignity than whining.”

“Do I know the lucky lady?”

“You remember Steffie Stephenson? Lives next door to our house?”

Hitch would never forget the many weekends during their college years he’d spent in the rambling, friendly, comfortable old house in a small North Carolina town. The MacCollums’ place, messy, noisy, filled with the aroma of Mama Mac’s good cooking, was as different from the house he’d grown up in as night from day.

He also remembered the Stephenson sisters next door, Stephanie and…was it Mary? Marnie? Something like that.

And hadn’t there been a third sister? He’d never actually met her, but he seemed to recall a red-haired kid scurrying around in the background.

“Yeah, I remember Steff,” he said, sipping the one drink a day he allowed himself. “Word of advice, Mac. Get out before it’s too late. Women need marriage. Men don’t. Don’t bother to question my logic—logic never was your strong suit—just take my word for it. Get out of Dodge.”

But Mac had talked him into it. Good old Mac, with his big ears, two left feet and ready grin. The guy could talk a dalmatian out of his spots. Hitch had hung up, having reluctantly agreed, and spent the next few minutes wondering how the devil Mac and Steff had ever got together. Unless she’d changed considerably since he’d last seen her, Stephanie Stephenson was a shallow little snob with a cover girl face and a one-cylinder brain.

Could she have finally wised up to the fact that Mac, for all he might act the clown, was a terrific guy? Or was it because, through a lot of hard work and some lucky breaks, he had parlayed the rundown ski resort he’d bought a few years ago into a thriving chain stretching all the way up into West Virginia?

Hitch polished off his drink, rose and stretched. He’d been working flat out for the past couple of years establishing his own business, JHH Designs, a small Richmond, Virginia, industrial design firm with a big future. He could use a break, and where better to take one than with the family who had treated him like one of their own?

That meant he’d be passing close to his parents’ place on the drive from Richmond to Mocksville. Might as well make an effort to mend a few fences. It had been nearly a year since he’d seen them, and that last scene had not been pleasant.

Maybe, he thought with bitter amusement, he could break the ice with a bit of gallows humor. Hey folks, whaddya think, if Mac’s marriage goes south the way most marriages seem to do these days, can the best man be nailed as an accessory after the fact?

Oh, yeah, that would really crack ’em up.

Both his parents were lawyers with strong control tendencies. The trait had caused problems from the time Hitch was old enough to leave small, sticky fingerprints on every polished surface in the somber old house.

His mother, a small woman with iron-gray hair worn in a knot at the back of her head, could get more mileage from a lifted eyebrow than most people could from a loaded gun. His paternal grandfather had been a Supreme Court judge. Most of his cousins were lawyers or judges. Hitch had been slated to follow the family calling, only he’d had ideas of his own.