O’Malley hadn’t thought she’d had potential. As a lover, that is. The asking her to be his wife part had only been an afterthought, she was sure. Something he thought he should do. Especially when he was about to lower the boom of his grand get-rich scheme. Having her safely married to him before she found out probably had seemed like a good idea at the time. The rat.
And now the rat was rich. Filthy rich. He didn’t need a little wife cutting coupons and sewing on buttons. Not that she had taken those courses just to make herself better equipped to be Joe’s wife, if the man were to come to his senses and figure out he simply could not live without her. Not at all.
Maddy stuck out her tongue, swiped it over her top lip, which had begun to tingle ominously.
And not that she needed grad school or cooking classes to strike out on her own. She could be on her own if she wanted to. Sure, she could. She could be working in some small museum, or in an art gallery somewhere. She could be independent. But, no. She had to leave the classroom, go running off to elope with a man whose kiss was enough to make her forget everything but the man, the kiss.
Which had gotten her—where? Almost to the altar, that’s where. With another man.
Maddy shook her head, banishing these pointless thoughts, knowing she had to stop using Joe as an excuse for her own failings. She hadn’t wanted a career, and she knew it now just as she had known it then. Only she hadn’t known what she wanted back then, and as Chandlers all went to college, she had gone to college. And gotten straight C’s, as Jessie had just pointed out.
She’d gotten straight A’s in all her classes at the community college. She loved her classes. That had to mean something. Had to mean more than that she had started taking the classes because Joe might come back and need a wife who knew how to cook. She enjoyed being domestic. Why, she’d even begun taking parenting classes last semester. Wasn’t that how she and Matt had gotten together? Because of their shared interest in having a family?
What Maddy wanted, had always wanted, she could now acknowledge, was a husband to love, a man who loved her above and beyond anything else in his world. And babies—lots of them. A home of her own. Let Jessie and Ryan run the business, heap more millions into her trust fund. She’d always be grateful to them for it. But she would be more than content to stay home and bake brownies, which she did now, from scratch, after taking a bakery class at the community college.
Cooking classes, classes on handling a family budget, gardening classes, even one on flower arranging—she’d taken them all, excelled at them all. Enjoyed them all.
Her degree in Art History meant less than nothing to her, but she truly treasured the First Place blue ribbon she had won last fall at the Great Allentown Fair for her chocolate cheesecake.
Eighteen months after admitting to Joe that she couldn’t boil water, Maddy had transformed herself into an accomplished cook, an enthusiastic gardener and a woman who actually knew how to hang wallpaper.
All so she could marry Matthew Garvey and have a house nearly as huge as this one, a staff to handle any emergency and enough free time to take every class the community college offered.
If there was something wrong with this, and Maddy was sure there was, she refused to recognize that she now had what it took to be a stay-at-home wife to a struggling young businessman, but she no longer had that struggling young businessman.
She unconsciously began to scratch at a spot behind her left ear.
“Maddy? Maddy. Allie’s talking to you,” Jessie said, giving her sister a playful shove in the ribs.
Maddy looked up at her grandmother, blinked a few times to clear her head and said rather dreamily, “Hmm?”
“Articulate as ever, darling,” Almira said, shaking her head. “I said, there’s a moving van next door. Mrs. Ballantine was nice enough to find your grandfather’s binoculars for me, and I wondered if you two wanted to go into the morning room, which has such lovely spying windows?”
Maddy shook her head. “Allie! Don’t tell me you actually want to spy on the new neighbors, see their furniture, probably make insulting cracks about every second piece that comes out of the truck.”
“And there’s something wrong with this?” Allie’s smile faded even as her green eyes twinkled. “Don’t let this miracle of plastic surgery fool you. I’m old now, Maddy, and just have to get my kicks wherever I can find them. So humor me, okay?”
Jessie was already on her feet. “Come on, Maddy, it’ll be fun.”
“For you, maybe,” Maddy said, also getting to her feet. “But Matt and I wanted to buy that house, remember? If I’m going to scope out the new neighbors, I’d much rather do it with Grandad’s old hunting rifle. Buying the place right out from under us like that, topping our bid with a one-time offer the Realtor couldn’t refuse.”
“I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse,” Jessie said, her voice rather muffled, as if she were speaking with marshmallows in her cheeks. “So, are you saying we’ve got nefarious characters moving into the old Harris house?”
“No, Jessie. What I’m saying is that I have next to no interest in our new neighbors. You and Allie go spy on them if you want. I’ll be out back, checking on my roses.” And taking a peek in the first mirror she saw on her way out, because her upper lip suddenly felt rather fat.
“Speaking of roses, I heard that the new owner is going to cut down all of Miriam Harris’s rose gardens and replace them with a second tennis court, or something like that,” Allie said as she walked away.
“What! How—how could they do that? Miriam’s roses have been there for fifty years, at least.” Maddy followed after Almira, nearly jogging to keep up with her grandmother’s brisk steps, all thoughts of mirrors and her possibly fat lip banished. “I mean, are these people absolute idiots? Who needs two tennis courts?”
Mrs. Ballantine stood at attention in the hallway, conveniently armed with a huge pair of vintage World War II field glasses, which she wordlessly passed to Almira before stepping back to let the three women pass. To an observant person, the two women performed like a well-trained tag-team wrestling duo. But Almira’s grandchildren weren’t being all that observant right now. At least one of them wasn’t, anyway.
“Who needs two tennis courts? I don’t know, dear, why don’t you look and see?” Almira answered, already in the mostly glass-sided morning room, the door closed behind them. Besides being the best vantage point to the driveway next door, the large, wicker-filled atrium was a family favorite for resting, and curling up with a good book.
Almira’s husband had added the room as an anniversary present years ago, and the only solid wall in the room was taken up with floor-to-ceiling bookcases stuffed three deep with romance novels. Sarah had them all cross-indexed and alphabetized, and a small card catalog stood in the far corner. Almira Chandler was very serious about her cherished books. Very serious.
Almira shoved the binoculars into Maddy’s hands—it was either take the things or have them jammed into her gut. “Why don’t you take a peek, and then maybe you can tell me what an idiot looks like. Or didn’t I mention that the owner is already on the property, overseeing the unloading of what looks to be a small mountain of boxes?”
Jessie, who had been watching all of this with a rather confused smile on her face—as she knew their grandmother never did anything without a reason—helpfully drew back the sheer curtains to
