The Groom Forgets
Autor:in
Liz Ireland
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Prologue
Vermont! Allan Steele thought peevishly. Who would have ever guessed that he would be getting married in Vermont?
The silver-gray Mercedes convertible with a black top sped furiously up and down the gently swelling hills of the two-lane, curvy road. The day was drizzly and uncomfortably cool, one of those early spring chills that could make a person nostalgic for the dog days of August.
Allan breathed out a long exasperated stream of cigarette smoke and hit the gas as he topped the crest of a hill. Well, at least after today this wedding would be over with. His bachelor days would finally be behind him, he and Jane would settle down into a serviceable routine, and he could forget all about personal problems and concentrate on what interested him most: making money.
Best of all, after this damn wedding he would probably never think of Patricia Blakemore.
That’s right, he grumbled cynically to himself. Life would be just hunky-dory—after the wedding. But it was raining, and he was lost, and there wouldn’t be a wedding if he couldn’t find the blasted farm Jane’s father owned.
Vermont? Until two days ago he hadn’t even known Jane came from Vermont! The five years she’d been his right-hand man at Steele and Grimly, Jane had lived in Brooklyn, so when they agreed to marry, he’d assumed they’d just jump in a cab and go to city hall. He never dreamed that sensible Jane would want a private ceremony, or that he’d have to take two whole days off from work, drive out all this way and get married among a lot of cows and bugs and relatives.
Women, he thought disgustedly, taking a staccato drag on his high-nicotine, high-tar, high-priced imported cigarette. Women were forever keeping their little secrets and springing them on a guy when he was least able to stick up for himself. He couldn’t very well have told Jane to forget the bucolic wedding thing without sounding like a complete pill.
Which reminded him—his head was splitting. He reached over, flipped open the glove compartment and rooted around with his hand until he found a little bottle of antihistamines. Clean country air always made him sick. He popped two pills, washed them down with a swig of flat diet soda and lit another smoke.
Vermont! He liked New York City, a place with grit, a place with a pulse all its own. Everything here seemed too green, too annoyingly pure.
A four-way intersection loomed ahead and he slammed on the brakes. That farm had to be around here somewhere. Jane had drawn him a map, but he’d lost track of what those stupid road signs were telling him miles ago. He’d have to call her for more directions. Meanwhile, he’d turn right.
The pristine treads on his tires sent gravel and mud spewing in his wake as he accelerated. God, he loved his car, loved it so much he almost cracked a smile.
Instead, he picked up the phone and, keeping half an eye on the road, punched in the number Jane had written in her clear handwriting at the bottom of the map. Great girl, Jane. Very tall—nice legs. Efficient, too. He wouldn’t regret marrying her. Especially not if the single night they had spent together was any indication of what their married relationship would be….
His ear was greeted with something it hadn’t heard in so long that his brain actually had a hard time computing the sound. A busy signal! Jane’s father didn’t have Call Waiting?
He slammed the phone down in its cradle and sucked on his cigarette to calm his nerves. He hated it when things didn’t go his way. And now he was late, late, late. Jane would expect that, of course, having worked with him for years. Still, it was his wedding day.
Drumming his fingers on the dash, he considered his options. That was one of his mottoes: Always keep an eye on your options. Life wasn’t so different from business. In either, a person could plunge ahead, freeze or bail out. He was already plunging ahead and freezing, so that left bailing out.
He wondered briefly what would happen if he turned tail and drove back to New York City—if he could manage to find it. Jane’s family would be outraged, but it would all blow over in the end. He would give Jane a few days off, let her rest up in the country. It would crush her, of course, but she would get over him eventually. He wouldn’t be the first groom to skip out on a woman.
Brides certainly did it often enough to men! He knew that from bitter experience. He had only been two weeks away from the altar when Patricia ran off to Paris, having decided, apparently, that a liaison with the most powerful man in network television would further her news career faster than marriage to a mere multimillionaire stockbroker.
He couldn’t fault anyone for wanting to get ahead. Not for nothing had The Wall Street Journal dubbed him “the barracuda of Wall Street” Maybe that was just his problem. Maybe he was too cynical and ruthless.
Except when it came to Patricia Blakemore. She was everything he ever wanted—tall, beautiful, successful and from a rich family. If I could just have Patricia, he used to think to himself, I would be able to relax. Then he would know he’d arrived in the world of rich untouchables. Forgotten would be the hungry days of his youth, and the bitterness he’d built up through the years. Maybe he’d even get into philanthropic activities, and actually work on making the world a better place, as he’d sometimes dreamed of as a kid when he’d been shunted from one foster home to the next.
Yeah, right. Patricia had pulled all his cockamamy dreams out from under him. The more fool he, he’d finally decided, after a month of moping, of letting his work flounder. True, he might get over her eventually— but what was the point of suffering such brutal heartache if a guy was just going to get over it and have a new woman kick him in the teeth? The smarter choice would be to find a sure bet, something that would pay off in the end. The IRA of women.
His dedicated assistant, Jane Fielding, fit the bill perfectly. Of course, his decision was colored by that single night, shortly after Patricia had bailed out on him, that Jane had gone out for drinks with him, lent him a shoulder to cry on and, later, a bed in Brooklyn to sleep in….
He picked up the phone again and pressed redial. Still busy! What was she doing on the phone when they were supposed to be getting married?
Probably trying to locate him, he thought with irritation.
Bail out, a niggling little voice inside his head told him. Maybe this was an omen, a sign that he could never be happy with a fresh-faced kid from Vermont.
But alongside that cynical directive came another voice. A feminine voice. Jane’s. “I love you, Allan.”
The night they made love, she had said those words in the heat of passion. And every time he’d thought of them since, they stopped him in his tracks. Loved him?
He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d heard that phrase in his life. Certainly never from any of his foster parents. Never from his real ones, either, whom he could barely remember. But Jane—who had never so much as hinted that she was attracted to him before that night—had declared that she loved him.
Had she been telling the truth?
Some part of him, some vulnerable, foolish part of him, wanted to find out. To go ahead with the marriage. To accept that love and perhaps even return it. If he was even capable of such a thing anymore.
Was he?
Oh, sure. About as capable as a goat was of flying.
He stubbed out his cigarette and was preparing to turn the car back to New York City when a red ash flicked down onto the carpet at the foot of the passenger seat. Burn holes killed the resale value! Instinctively, he reached over to pat it out, using the floor mat as an extinguisher.
Certain the crisis had passed, he straightened up and gasped. A huge black and white cow had stepped into the road, right in front of his path. Allan let out a string of curses and madly turned the steering wheel at the same time he hit the brakes.
An earsplitting squeal met his ears as those pristine treads grasped futilely at the slick pavement. His snazzy love car skidded crazily, avoiding the cow but still going too fast as it headed toward the ditch—and the telephone pole on the other side of it. As the Mercedes pitched over the rut, Allan clung to the steering wheel for dear life, not even letting go when his vehicle made direct contact with the telephone pole.
Something exploded, glass shattered, and the sickening sound of crunching metal ripped through the air. Then, just that quickly, all was silence, except for one mocking sound, the last noise Allan Steele would hear on what was supposed to be the day of his very practical wedding.
Moo.
