Marrying Maddy. Kasey Michaels

at least two feet high, and was fashioned out of some sort of porcelain. And it had to be old as dirt, something Great-Aunt Harriet had pulled from her collection and forwarded to her great-niece instead of just sending her another silver tray, like any normal person.

      The Thing had a lid, and the lid had a handle—two close-to-naked cherubs cavorting. The Thing also had side handles, both of them similarly un-clothed cherubs bent forward at the waist, and looking as if they were about to do swan dives onto the floor.

      She and Joe would have laughed and laughed—no! She would not think of Joe O’Malley again.

      She scratched at an annoying itch behind her knee, and went back to inspecting her latest gift.

      The Thing was so ugly, so overdone with intricate scrollwork and rosy-cheeked cherubs, and even bits of faux greenery, that Maddy was sure it had to be worth a small fortune. Ugly things almost always were. Worst of all, it seemed familiar; like something she’d at least seen a variation of during her college studies.

      Carefully removing the dome lid and placing it back in the box, Maddy lifted the remaining piece and inspected the bottom of the base. “Nove, with an asterisk under it. Good Lord, Jessie, it’s a Le Nove. I should have known. I remember one from my classes—covered in shells and painted with mythological figures. Look, there are shells on this one, too, along the base. Well, at least now I know what to say in my thank-you note to Great-Aunt Harriet.”

      “You sure do, Maddy. ‘Dear Aunt Harriet, thank you so much for the exquisite Nove. It will look so lovely in the basement storage area.’”

      Maddy rolled her eyes, even as she scratched at her chin. “Jessie, this is a Nove. Straight from the late 1700s. A true, if revolting, work of art. I wouldn’t put it in the basement. Great-Aunt Harriet meant well, and always does.” She replaced the lid, tucked the vase back into its box. Then she smiled evilly. “I’ll give it to Allie.”

      “Only if you want to be cut out of my will, young lady,” Almira Chandler said as she walked into the room, looked down into the tissue-filled box. “Did I hear someone say Great-Aunt Harriet? For our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, she sent back the silver compote your grandfather and I had given her one Christmas. That’s Harriet, the idiot. Some people give gifts that keep on giving, or whatever. Harriet just keeps recycling the same old stuff. I imagine it makes some sort of sense—to her.”

      “But you love her, Allie,” Maddy said. “You love her because she’s three years younger than you and looks ten years older. Like you’ve said, you just can’t turn your back on a woman who makes you look so good at family parties.”

      “Twenty years older than me, Maddy, not ten.” Almira laughed as she peered down into the box. “Now, what did the idiot send over now? The woman’s been cleaning house and stuffing up all her relatives’ houses for the last decade, saying she’s going to die any day and wants her treasures in loving hands first. Which,” she ended, straightening, “explains that hideous Chelsea tea caddy Mrs. Ballantine keeps insisting on putting on the breakfast table. Just what I want to wake up to, certainly. A grinning idiot figure of a man with a round, bare belly and a lotus leaf for a hat. He even has teeth, for crying out loud. And Harriet will linger on another twenty years, until she’s buried us all under her junk.”

      “Very valuable junk, Allie, according to Maddy, our very own Art History major, although we probably should remember she graduated with only a C average,” Jessie interjected, opening yet another box, pulling out yet another silver tray. “My, Maddy, this is your lucky day, isn’t it?”

      Maddy looked at her sister, slimmer than her, taller by four inches, older by three years. Jessie had dark honey-brown hair as opposed to Maddy’s own deepest black, pale blue eyes to her vibrant green. She was a bright, talented, successful young woman with a lifelong air of dignity and composure about her that Maddy had always envied, even as she had tagged after her, worshiping her.

      Jessica was so confident, so sure of herself, and always had been. So successful, working side by side with their brother, Ryan, in the family business.

      Maddy wished she could be more like her sister, rather than being the “baby” of the family, the one without a job, without a career, without, it seemed, much ambition or direction at all. And not expected to have any of those attributes, either, come to think of it.

      If they’d had a Chandler family pet, they’d expect it to learn more tricks than they had ever expected from Maddy. No one in the family had batted a single eye or made a single comment when she’d withdrawn from her graduate courses, come home and learned how to cook pot roast. She sometimes wondered if she’d accepted Matt’s proposal because she loved him, or because he, at least, seemed to think she had some sort of potential.

      Not that Joe 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