“My family would consider that blasphemy. Or maybe insanity.” Holly’s smile faded a little. “You see why I can’t come back home to work, don’t you, Brenna? I love my family dearly, but my visits here over the years have already given me a taste of what it would be like if 1 lived among my relatives full-time.”
Brenna knew. “An endless succession of setups with any man deemed marriageable by your mother and your sister, and your aunts and cousins.”
“And their idea of an eligible bachelor runs a wide gamut, from the twenty-two-year-old video games fanatic to the sixty-one-year-old widower who owns his own real estate agency and has two daughters older than me.” Holly heaved a reminiscent groan.
The heart knows no age limit, Aunt Hedy had said blithely. She was the one who’d fixed Holly up with the real estate agent, already a grandfather five times over.
A young man needs the guiding hand of a loving older woman, said Aunt Honoria. The video games nut, a college student who’d looked and acted not a day over sixteen, had been her contribution to the collective Marry-Off-Holly effort.
Your aunts love you, they care about you, they know a woman isn’t happy without a husband. Helene Casale, Holly’s mother, made no apologies for her two sisters’ matchmaking attempts.
No wonder. Mom had been responsible for her own selection of dud blind dates for Holly. The pet shop owner whose sole topics of conversation were tropical fish and reptiles. The lawyer who specialized in personal injury suits and bribed ambulance drivers to beep him so he could arrive at accident scenes to pass out his cards. There had been others, though none quite as memorably horrific.
Holly’s older sister Hope and their cousins, Hillary, Heather, and Hayley—all married—had also done their share for “The Cause” over the years, producing a contingent of men whom Holly was lovingly bullied into meeting. Sometimes the men actually were nice, normal and perfectly adequate human beings. Sometimes there would be second dates and even a few more after that.
But so far, friendship rather than romance had resulted in every case because both Holly and the selected matrimonial candidate would recognize that their budding relationship was fated to be platonic, not romantic.
The female members of the clan were in despair that Holly, who had countless male friends, had never come close to nabbing that ultimate prize—an engagement ring. To be followed by the traditional big white wedding. Then the nagging to produce children could rightfully begin. Both Hillary and Heather already had a daughter apiece. Hope and Hayley were each trying zealously to conceive.
“I guess the fact that little Heidi is engaged and planning her wedding hasn’t made things any easier for you.” Brenna was sympathetic.
Little Heidi was Holly’s youngest cousin, who’d turned twenty last month and was currently flashing a minute solitaire on her finger. Though barely a diamond chip bought with the twenty-one-year-old husband-to-be’s student loan money, it was still an engagement ring provided by an authentic fiancé.
“Poor Mom. I felt so sorry for her when Heidi announced her engagement at the family’s monthly brunch.” Holly grimaced at the memory. “Mom claimed she was thrilled about little Heidi’s engagement but she left shortly afterward. She claimed she’d been food poisoned, but we all knew why she really felt sick.”
“Never mind that she has a daughter who graduated with honors from the University of Michigan’s med school and completed a psychiatric residency there.” Brenna’s blue eyes flashed. “That doesn’t count because Honoria is the one meeting with bridal consultants and shopping with Heidi for her wedding gown.”
“True. The fact that I’m twenty-nine without a single prospective son-in-law in sight is what really counts as far as Mom is concerned,” Holly said dryly.
“God, Holly, it makes me furious on your behalf! Furious and...and crazy.”
“Don’t be. And as a newly board-certified shrink. I advise you to redirect your anger into something positive. Like making plans to visit me in Sioux Falls as soon as I get settled in. Promise you’ll come soon, Bren.”
“I promise.” Brenna nodded her head. “And it’ll have to be soon because doesn’t winter come early there? Like around the first of September?”
“South Dakota is not in the Arctic Circle, Brenna. And considering some of the winters we’ve had here in Michigan, we really have no room to mock the weather anywhere else.”
“You’re getting defensive about your new hometown already. I guess you’ll fit in out there in Frontier Land. Well, Sioux Falls is lucky to have you, Holly. I just hope that you’ll...” Brenna paused, an unholy gleam in her eyes. “That you’ll meet the man of your dreams there. Imagine the thrill of being deluged with Planning the Perfect Wedding Guides from all your approving relatives!”
There was a knock on the door and Helene Casale entered Holly’s bedroom.
“How is the packing coming, Holly?” she asked, glancing at the suitcases that lay opened and half full on the bed.
“It’s coming along fairly well, Mom.”
“Don’t forget to pack this, Holly. You never know when you might need it for reference.” Helene Casale put a copy of The Rules into the suitcase, then handed one of the books to Brenna. “And you take one, too, dear. The authors practically guarantee a proposal if you follow their advice. Rumor has it that J.F.K. Jr.’s bride was a Rules girl.”
Holly’s eyes met Brenna’s and she read her friend’s silent message. Accepting the offer to join the Widmark family practice in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, far from her ever-loving, ever-obsessed-with-her-marital-status relatives, was definitely the right move.
The plane touched down at the Sioux Falls airport nearly two hours after its scheduled arrival time, the delay resulting from a mechanical problem discovered in Minneapolis shortly before takeoff.
Rafe Paradise glanced at his watch again.
“Watching the clock isn’t going to make the time pass any faster.” His seatmate, a petite blonde in a chic gray suit spoke up, her tone amused. “It’s ten minutes past the last time you checked. You really are in a hurry to get home, aren’t you?”
“Actually, no.” Rafe managed to return her smile. There was a difference between wanting to get home and having to get back as soon as possible, though he didn’t feel like discussing the whys and wherefores with the pretty woman sitting next to him.
She’d been flirting with him all during the flight and had already ascertained that he wasn’t married, that he was a lawyer who lived in Sioux Falls and had no significant other in his life. Rafe had answered her very direct questions without posing any of his own, but the blonde kept the conversation going, undeterred by his perfunctory responses.
He now knew that her name was Lorna Larson, that she lived and worked in the Twin Cities and was making one of her frequent business trips to Sioux Falls. (“Thanks to the deregulation of telecommunications, Sioux Falls has become a major center of credit card processing and telemarketing,” Lorna, a self-proclaimed rising star in a telecommunications company, explained to him.)
As if he, a lifelong native of the city, didn’t already know. Still, Rafe made no comment. Why bother to go through the motions—me flirtatious smiles, the eye contact, the exchange of personal info and other requisite preliminaries? As soon as he mentioned his situation, the come-hither glow in Lorna Larson’s eyes would turn to frost.
Worse, he didn’t care. His interest in sex had sunk to ground zero, Rafe acknowledged grimly, because the lack of female companionship in his life no longer even bothered him. Since he’d inherited his two younger half sisters last year—there were other words he could use to describe how they’d happened to land in his life