Raye Morgan - The Hand-Picked Bride

He was laughing at her. She could see it in his eyes, but she couldn’t for the life of her see why he would find this amusing.

“I think there must have been a misunderstanding...” he began.

She sighed. It looked as if she was going to have to be explicit. “That’s just the point,” she told him sweetly. “You see, I never planned to go out with you. That’s not why I came.”

He blinked. “Well, that’s good,” he said, his voice almost too hearty. “Because I never planned to ask you.”

“Oh, come on,” she began, but a small hint of unease began to tickle deep inside. After all, nothing up to this point had made much sense, had it?

“Seriously, I didn’t bring you in here to ask you out on a date.”

“And he’d better not,” said a chirpy voice from behind her. “Because that would mean that he would have to stand me up. And I get ugly when I get stood up.”

Jolene hadn’t noticed the door opening, but she whirled to behold a pretty young woman with long black hair and bangs that barely cleared her huge blue eyes leaning in the doorway. Grant rose, coughing delicately into his hand in a way that Jolene later realized could only have been to hide his grin.

“Uh, Jolene Campbell, this is Kim Mancini—my date for this evening.”

“Your...”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, Kim and I have been dating for about three months now. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”

“Uh-huh.” Kim nodded her head perkily. “We met at my cousin’s wedding. I fell in the swimming pool and Grant pulled me out by my hair.” She giggled. “Isn’t that romantic?”

“Very,” Jolene agreed with a weak smile.

Grant rose from behind his desk and came around quickly, as though to get between the two women before things got messy. “Well, I guess we’ll see you bright and early tomorrow morning,” he said, shaking Jolene’s hand and smiling in a way that said clearly the interview was over. “How would eight do? I’m glad you’ve decided to join us.”

Jolene managed to salvage a smile before she turned to go. When she glanced back as she closed the door, she saw Kim melting into Grant’s arms, and the blush that had begun creeping up her neck a few minutes earlier made a major surge up and over her cheeks. She took a very deep breath and made her escape to the parking lot.

Humiliation? That was too wimpy a word for what she was feeling. She fell into the driver’s seat of her car and let out a silent scream before starting the engine. If only there was a way to rewind life and do it over.

Four

“You can imagine what a fool I felt like,” Jolene sighed as she talked to Mandy later that evening, as the two of them shared hot cocoa on the couch. Kevin was in his bed, sound asleep, the two women were both in pajamas, talking softly in the dim lamplight.

“In fact, the only time in my life when I’ve felt more of a fool,” Jolene went on, “was one time in church when I gave a blistering lecture to some young guy who winked at me. I’d just been named May Queen at school and I was feeling pretty full of myself, I guess. Anyway, this poor sap sat there while I lectured, turning red, and finally managed to mumble to me that he was actually winking at his fiancée who was sitting in the pew behind me.”

Mandy laughed, propping her feet in their panda slippers up on the coffee table. “Not good.”

“No.” Jolene shook her head, remembering. “Half the congregation heard the whole thing and there was definitely some snickering in the ranks.” She sighed sadly, her silver eyes full of tragedy. “But in many ways, this was worse. I can’t tell you exactly why. It just was.” She groaned and threw back her head. “Do I have to go back there tomorrow? Isn’t there some way I could win the lottery or find out some rich uncle left me all his fortune so I don’t have to go?”

Mandy popped a marshmallow into her mouth and shook her head. “The lottery isn’t until Saturday and you told me you didn’t have any living relatives.”

“That’s just the point, silly,” Jolene muttered, grabbing her cocoa mug and holding it to her as if it were a life preserver. “He wouldn’t have to be living, would he? Hah. Got you there.”

Mandy laughed, but quickly sobered, looking at her friend guiltily. “Well, if you really can’t stand the thought of going back there, I could always...”

Jolene picked up a pillow and threatened her with it. “If you say one more word about going back to that horrible factory job, I’ll bean you with this. I’m a big girl, Mandy.” Dropping the pillow, she lifted her chin in mock heroic fashion. “I can handle humiliation and ridicule. I can handle having Grant think I’m an addle-pated ego maniac. I’m tough and I’m desperate—always a strong combination.”

Mandy stared at her friend for a long moment, then gave a slight shrug. “Jolene, what about contacting Jeff? You know where he is now, and he is Kevin’s father. He ought to provide some support...”

“No.” Jolene said it abruptly, with a tone of finality that should have put an end to the discussion. But seeing the look on Mandy’s face, she relented and tried to explain.

“As far as I’m concerned, Jeff was no more a father to Kevin than...than the milkman could have been. Just handing over some genes doesn’t make a father out of a man. Loving and caring and attention are what do it. And that Kevin never got from Jeff.”

Mandy raised a knowing eyebrow. “Legally he owes you.”

Jolene nodded. “But practically, we’re better off without him.”

There it was, short and sweet. She could see that Mandy didn’t agree, but Mandy didn’t have a child and an ex-husband who had run out on her. Rising, she carried both their mugs out to the kitchen to rinse them, as though the activity would take up her mind and keep out the memories. But it didn’t work. They came anyway.

Short and sweet. That was her entire life. Well, maybe short and not so sweet was more like it. She’d met Jeff in junior college. She was majoring in culinary arts and nutrition and he was majoring in partying 101. Actually he was a drama major, bound for the silver screen someday, or so he said. She should have known better. She did know better. She’d grown up in a working-class family and she knew you had to struggle for the good things in life, that luxuries didn’t fall into your lap just because you wanted them to, that being an actor was pretty pie in the sky, that guys who could act had probably done a lot of practicing at lying. But his dazzling smile, his gorgeous tan, his china blue eyes, all had blinded her and she’d married him.

To this day she couldn’t believe she’d done it. It had all happened so fast. He’d wanted to get intimate and she’d said not without a wedding ring and he’d said, okay, as easy as that and they’d raced off to Las Vegas before she could catch her breath.

“There you go,” she thought to herself now. Marry in haste, repent at leisure, her grandma had always said. Grandma was great for advice. She’d also warned Jolene never to marry a man who wore a thick gold chain around his neck. “You can see right away that he’s vain as a peacock,” she’d said.

“And Grandma was never wrong,” Jolene murmured. Vain as a peacock. That pretty well described Jeff. One good thing was she’d learned her lesson. She would never fall for a pretty boy again.

Jeff was long gone now. All it had taken was the news that Kevin was on the way and he’d already had his bag half packed.

“Don’t you see, Jolene,” he told her earnestly, as though he just couldn’t understand why she didn’t want the best for him just like he did. “If I’m ever going to make it in Hollywood I have to be free to focus all my psychic energy on the goal. If I get distracted by other things, I might lose the race. I can’t afford to let that happen.”