BEVERLY BARTON - Whitelaw's Wedding

She would never forget Rodney. A part of her heart would always belong to him. Except for her teenage infatuation with Hunter, Rodney had been her first love. Until they met at the hospital where he’d been an intern when her father had been a chemotherapy patient, she had gone systematically through young men as if they were disposable tissues. From the age of sixteen until she met Rodney, she had dated dozens of guys, but not one of them had been special to her. By the time young Dr. Austin came along, she was accustomed to being the center of attention. And she had to admit that she had loved being pursued by countless lovesick boys. What a silly, foolish girl she’d been.

Falling in love with Rodney had been a good thing for her. Everyone had said so. And her entire family had not only approved her choice, but had adored Rodney as much as his mother had adored her. It had been considered an ideal match. After dating exclusively for eight months, during her senior year of college, Rodney had proposed and their families had combined efforts to plan an elaborate autumn wedding. A wedding that was supposed to be the beginning of a perfect life together.

Although they had come close to giving in to temptation, she and Rodney had stopped their lovemaking time and again before it progressed to the final act. They had agreed that since Manda was a virgin they would wait to consummate their love on their wedding night. An old-fashioned notion for people of their generation, but Rodney had been an old-fashioned kind of guy. She supposed that was one reason Grams had thought the world of him.

Manda had once believed that the day Rodney died was the worst day of her life. She had never known such agony. And it had been a pain that stayed with her, that was even now a part of her. Losing her father six months later, when he finally succumbed to cancer, had only added to her misery. But she hadn’t know what true suffering was until someone killed Mike Farrar, a dear, kind man who had been murdered because he dared to care about her enough to ask her to marry him. Realizing that she had quite possibly been the cause of two men’s deaths had almost destroyed her. If it hadn’t been for Perry and Grams and the support of the other grief counselors at the clinic where she worked, she might have done something stupid. For several weeks after Mike’s murder, she had been so distraught that she’d actually contemplated suicide.

What was it about her, she wondered, that brought death to those she loved? Except for Grams and Perry, she had lost everyone who had ever been important to her. Her mother had died in childbirth, something practically unheard of at the time. And then Hunter had rejected her foolish advances and walked out of her life. He’d been the only man who’d ever broken her heart. And then she had lost Rodney, followed by her father’s death and then finally Mike’s murder. She could not risk ever caring about another person. Others had to be aware of the horrible truth—loving Manda put your life in danger. She supposed on a subconscious level she had steered clear of even close friendships with other women, fearing that the Manda Munroe Curse would strike again.

For the past five years she had kept all of her relationships, with men and women alike, on a strictly casual basis. By doing this, she had held the curse at bay. But now she was planning to tempt fate by announcing to the world that in two weeks she was going to marry Hunter Whitelaw.

Although Perry had insisted that he be their guest at the Munroe home on North Pine Street, Hunter had opted to stay at his grandmother’s old house out on Mulberry Lane. He supposed he should have sold the place after Granny died, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to sell a property that had been in his family for several generations. His grandfather had been born in this old house, and so had his great-grandfather, in the first month of the first year of the twentieth century—January 1, 1900.

When he’d been a young idiot, Hunter had thought that what he wanted more than anything was to get away from the farm, to figure out a way to become a part of the social set to which his good buddy Perry Munroe belonged. As a young man he had been overly impressed with the fine homes on North Pine Street, with the sleek sports cars the rich boys drove and with the snobbish little debutantes who wouldn’t give him the time of day because he was poor. Of course, there was one girl who’d been different. But at the time, Manda had been years too young for him.

Odd that what was so important to a guy when he was twenty wasn’t what mattered to him when he was forty.

In the best of all possible worlds, he would come back home, renovate the old house and either raise cattle or rebuild the once thriving fruit orchard. Maybe he’d do both. And in that fantasy life, there was always a woman and a couple of kids living here on the farm with him. But after his experience with Selina, he hadn’t found a woman he wanted to be his wife. Of course, he hadn’t been looking. Actually, he’d been doing the exact opposite. He steered clear of any woman who possessed the qualities he now wanted in a mate. Loyalty. Compassion. A desire to live a simple life, to build a home and have children.

He’d told himself more than once this past year that when he retired from the Dundee agency, he’d return to Dearborn. Maybe while he was in town on this job for Perry, he could see about hiring a contractor and getting some work done on the old place. He had enough money to turn the family farmhouse into a showplace. Once he and Manda announced their engagement, him renovating the house would create speculation among her acquaintances as to whether he would dare to bring Manda out here to live.

Hunter laughed. After they married, maybe he should bring her here to stay for a while. She’d be miserable. The place was terribly rundown and still decorated with his grandmother’s old furniture that had already seen better days when he’d been a child. No, there wasn’t any need to make things worse for Manda than they already were. If the nutcase who wanted to control her life came out in the open with threats and maybe an attempt on his or Manda’s life, she would have enough to deal with. But a part of him couldn’t help wondering how Miss Manda would cope with life on the farm.

Hunter poured himself a cup of coffee from the old metal percolator his granny had used as far back as he could remember. Taking his coffee mug with him, he shoved open the kitchen door and walked out onto the back porch. The sun had just begun its ascent from the eastern horizon, but already at seven o’clock in the morning, the day was warm, predicting the accuracy of the weatherman’s forecast that the temperature would climb into the high eighties by midafternoon. Barefoot and bare-chested, he strolled out into the yard. Weeds infested Granny’s once picture-perfect flower beds that surrounded the ramshackle old house. His feet touched the dew-laden grass as he ventured past the wire clothesline and toward the small orchard of pear trees his great-grandfather had planted decades ago.

There was a sense of homecoming in being here, in setting foot on land that had been possessed by his ancestors for close to a hundred and fifty years. Strange how when he’d been a teenager, he had longed to get away from this place, from the daily chores that went along with being a farm kid.

Now, he wished that Granny and Pop were still alive so that he could tell them how wrong he’d been about wanting to escape the peace and solitude of the farm to live in a big city.

Had that been how his mother had felt when she’d run away at seventeen? Had she wanted to escape? But what she’d done was get herself pregnant. Unmarried and abandoned by her boyfriend, Tina Whitelaw had been forced to come home to her parents. Hunter had never known his father, didn’t even know who the man was. No name. No description. Nothing. His mother had returned to the farm, dumped him on her parents and before his first birthday, had left again. They hadn’t heard from her in years when they received a phone call ten years later telling them that she’d died from a drug overdose. She’d been living with her fourth husband in Los Angeles.