The Marriage Conspiracy. Christine Rimmer

can’t control the weather, hon.”

      “I know, I know.”

      “The backyard looks festive. And Mesta Park is such a lovely area. I always admire it so every time I visit.”

      Mesta Park lay in the heart of Oklahoma City, a charming old neighborhood with lots of classic prairie-style houses and graceful mature trees. Joleen’s mother had owned the house on Northwest Seventeenth Street since she herself had been a young bride.

      Aunt LeeAnne patted Joleen’s arm. “I do think we ought to start the ceremony soon, though, don’t you?”

      “Soon,” Joleen repeated. What else could she say?

      Aunt LeeAnne stopped patting. She gripped Joleen’s arm and whispered in her ear, “I see that you invited the Atwoods.”

      Joleen made a noise in the affirmative and flicked a quick glance toward the well-dressed couple standing by themselves near the punch table. Bobby Atwood, the couple’s only son, had died just six weeks ago, in a power-skiing accident on Lake Thunderbird. Pictures of the funeral service had dominated the local news. Atwood, after all, was an important name in the state of Oklahoma.

      In spite of what had happened between herself and Bobby, the sight of his grieving parents at graveside had proved too much for Joleen. She hadn’t been able to stop herself from reaching out to them.

      “You have a good heart, Joly,” whispered Aunt LeeAnne. “There aren’t many who would be so forgiving.”

      “Well, it seemed like a nice gesture, to ask them if they’d like to come.”

      Aunt LeeAnne made a small, sympathetic noise and patted Joleen’s arm some more.

      Joleen added, “And I do want Sam to know his father’s parents.”

      Sam. Just the thought of her little boy lightened Joleen’s mood. She looked for him, caught sight of him with her younger sister, thirteen-year-old Niki, about twenty feet away, near the tall white picket fence that surrounded her mother’s backyard on three sides. Niki, in a rose-red dress identical to Joleen’s, had agreed to watch Sam so that Joleen could handle all the details of running the wedding.

      Sam had his daddy’s hair, thick and straight and sandy colored. As Joleen watched, he threw back that sandy head and let out his almost-a-baby laugh. At the sound of that laugh, Joleen’s heart seemed to get bigger inside her chest.

      Then she noticed that Bobby’s father was staring right at her.

      Robert Atwood quickly looked away. But not before she saw a lot more than she wanted to see in his cold, gray glance. Her little boy’s grandfather did not approve of her. And he was looking down his snooty nose at the members of her family.

      The Atwoods moved in the best circles. They hung out with the governor and his pretty wife, attended all the most important political and social events in the city. Robert Atwood’s expression made it painfully clear that he found this small-scale backyard wedding to be tacky and totally beneath him.

      And now he was staring at Sam. So was his wife, Antonia. The woman wore a look of longing so powerful it sent a chill down Joleen’s spine in spite of the heat.

      I probably should have listened to Dekker, Joleen thought. Dekker—who’d better show up soon or they were going ahead without him—had warned her to stay away from Robert Atwood and his wife.

      “Unless you’re after a little of the Atwood money,” he’d said. “Sam is entitled to some of that.”

      “It is not the money, Dekker. Honestly. We’re gettin’ by all right.”

      “Okay. Then forget the Atwoods. They have too much money and too much power and, given the kind of son they raised, I’d say they’re way too likely to abuse both.”

      She had punched him playfully on the arm. “You are so cynical it scares me sometimes.”

      “You ought to be scared of the Atwoods, of the trouble they’ll probably cause you if you tell them about Sam. I mean it. Take my advice and stay away from them.”

      But she hadn’t taken her friend’s advice. Robert Atwood sold real estate on a grand scale. He dealt in shopping centers and medical complexes and skyscrapers with a thousand and one offices in them. She had called him at Atwood and Son Property Development.

      At first, Bobby’s father had refused to see her or to believe that his precious son could have fathered a child he didn’t even know about. In the end, though, the hope that there might be something of Bobby left on the earth must have been too powerful to deny. He had called Joleen and asked if he and his wife might meet Sam. And as soon as they set eyes on her baby boy, they knew who his father had to be.

      “Joly, hon…”

      Joleen looked into her aunt’s flushed face and smiled. “Hmm?”

      “I just have to say this. I have got a powerful feeling that we will be watching you take your walk down the aisle very soon now.” Aunt LeeAnne beamed up at her.

      Joleen kept her smile. But it did get old sometimes.

      Here’s to you, Joly. We all know it’s bound to be your turn next….

      I just know you are going to meet someone so special….

      I see a man in your future, hon. The right man this time….

      Those she loved would not stop telling her that true love and happily-ever-after were coming her way.

      Joleen fully understood why they did it. None of them could quite believe that she, the levelheaded one, the both-feet-firmly-on-the-ground one, had gone and fallen for a rich boy’s honeyed lies.

      They felt sorry for her. They wanted the best for her.

      And to them the best meant a good man to stand at her side, a husband to help her raise her child.

      “I don’t think so, Aunt LeeAnne.”

      “Well, you just think what you want. I am right about this and you will see that I am.”

      Oh, please, Joleen thought. As if she even had time for love and romance at this point in her life. She had a toddler to raise and a business to run—not to mention a recently delinquent thirteen-year-old sister and a stunningly beautiful fifty-year-old widowed mother who somehow managed to fall in and out of love on what seemed like a weekly basis. DeDe might be off her hands after today, but Niki and her mother still counted on Joleen to be there whenever they needed her.

      And really, Joleen didn’t mind being the one they counted on. She was happy. She honestly was. With her precious little son and her beloved if somewhat troublesome mama and sisters, with the beauty salon she and her mother operated together and with lots of loving family and good friends—including Dekker, who in the past few years had become her closest friend.

      Dekker, who was now so late she doubted he would make it at all.

      Nope. It would not be Joleen’s turn next. Not for a decade or so, at least. Maybe more than a decade. Maybe never. In any case, not “next.”

      But she didn’t tell her aunt LeeAnne that. Instead, she hooked her arm around her aunt’s round shoulders and gave a loving squeeze. “Whatever you say.”

      By three-thirty, Joleen decided they had waited long enough. She left the drooping guests behind beneath the pecan trees, entered the house and climbed the stairs to her mother’s big bedroom on the second floor, which today was serving as the bride’s dressing room.

      DeDe, who looked absolutely breathtaking in floor-length white satin, came at her the minute Joleen appeared in the doorway. “Where is he? Is he here yet?”

      Joleen shook her head.

      “Oh, no.” DeDe stopped in midstride and caught her full lower lip between her small white teeth. “How’s Wayne holdin’ up?”

      Wayne