Wedding Vows: With This Ring. Barbara Hannay

and that view had intensified after she had flirted with a major life change in the form of Chuck. Since then Second Chances had become more her safe haven than ever.

      “What kind of changes?” she asked Miss Viv now, failing to keep a certain trepidation from entering her voice.

      “Mr. Whitford will be happy to brief you, um, after you’ve changed into something more appropriate,” Miss Viv said, and then glanced at her watch. “Oh, my! I do have a plane to catch. I’m going to a spa in Arizona, my dear.”

      “You’re going to a spa in Arizona, and you didn’t tell anyone?” It seemed unimaginable. That kind of vacation usually should have entailed at least a swimsuit shopping excursion together!

      “The opportunity came up rather suddenly,” Miss Viv said, unapologetically thrilled. “A bolt from the blue, an unexpected gift from an old friend.”

      Molly tried to feel delighted for her. No one deserved a wonderful surprise more than her boss.

      “For how long?” she asked.

      But the shameful truth was Molly did not feel delighted at her boss’s good fortune. Sudden change. Molly hated that kind more than the regular variety.

      “Two weeks,” Miss Viv said with a sigh of anticipated delight.

      Two weeks? Molly wanted to shout. That was ridiculous. People went to spas for a few hours, maybe a few days, never two weeks!

      “But when you come back, everything will be back to normal?” Molly pressed.

      Miss Viv laughed. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “What is normal? A setting on a clothes dryer as far as I’m concerned.”

      Molly stared at her boss. What was normal? Not something to be joked about! It was what Molly had never had. She’d never had a normal family. Her engagement had certainly not been normal. It felt as if she had spent a good deal of her life searching for it, and coming up short. Even her pets were never normal.

      Molly’s life had been populated with the needy kind of animal that no one else wanted. A dog with three legs, a cat with no meow. Her current resident was a bald budgie, his scrawny body devoid of feathers.

      “I’ve been thinking of retiring,” Miss Viv shocked Molly further by saying. “So, who knows? After the two weeks is up, we’ll just play it by ear.”

      Molly wanted to protest that she didn’t like playing it by ear. She liked plans and schedules, calendars that were marked for months in advance.

      If Miss Viv retired, would Houston Whitford be in charge forever?

      She could not think of a way of asking that did not show her dread at the prospect!

      Besides, there is no forever, Molly reminded herself. That was precisely why she had put on this dress. To debunk forever myths.

      She particularly did not want to entertain that word anywhere near the vicinity of him, a man whose faintest touch could make a woman’s vows of self-reliance disintegrate like foundations crumbling at the first tremor of the coming quake.

Chapter Two

      THE bride flounced out of the room, and unbidden, words crowded into Houston’s brain.

       And then they lived happily ever after.

      He scoffed at himself, and the words. Yes, it was true that a dress like that, filled out by a girl like Molly Michaels, represented a fairy tale.

      But the fact she was stuck in it, the zipper stubborn, her hair wound painfully around the pearls, represented more the reality: relationships of the romantic variety were sticky, complicated, entrapping.

      Besides, a man didn’t come from the place Houston Whitford had come from and believe in fairy tales. He believed in his own strength, his own ability to survive. He saw the cynicism with which he had regarded that dress as a gift.

      In fact, the unexpected appearance of one of the Second Chances employees in full wedding regalia only confirmed what several weeks of research had already told him.

      Second Chances reminded Houston, painfully, of an old-style family operated bookstore. Everyone was drawn to the warmth of it, it was always crowded and full of laughter and discussion, but when it came time to actually buy a book it could not compete with the online giants, streamlined, efficient, economical. Just how Houston liked his businesses, running like well-oiled machines. No brides, no ancient, adorable little old ladies at the helm.

      He fought an urge to press the scar over the old break on the bridge of his nose. It ached unbearably lately. Had it ached ever since, in a rare moment of weakness, he had agreed to help out here? This wasn’t his kind of job. He dealt in reality, in cold, hard fact. Where did a poorly run charity, with brides in the hallways and octogenarians behind the desks, fit into his world?

      “And that was our Molly,” Miss Viv said brightly. “Isn’t she lovely?”

      “Lovely,” Houston managed. He recalled part two of his mission here.

      Miss Viv had confessed to him she was thinking of retiring. She loved Molly and considered her her natural successor. But she was a little worried. She wanted his opinion on whether Molly was too soft-hearted for the job.

      “Is she getting ready for her wedding?” On the basis of their very brief encounter, Molly Michaels seemed the kind of woman that a man who was not cynical and jaded like him—a man who believed in fairy tales, love ever after, family—would snatch up.

      He didn’t even like the direction of those thoughts. The wedding dress should only be viewed in the context of the job he had to do here. What was Miss Michaels doing getting ready for her wedding at work? How did that reflect on a future for her in management?

      The job he hadn’t wanted was getting less attractive by the second. A demand of complete professionalism was high on his list of fixes for the ailing companies he put back on the track to success.

      “She’s not getting ready for her wedding,” Miss Viv said with a sympathetic sigh. “The exact opposite, I’m afraid. Her engagement broke off before they even set a date. A blessing, though the poor child did not see it that way at the time. She’s not been herself since it happened.”

      At this point, with anyone else, he would make it clear, right now, he didn’t want to know a single thing about Molly Michaels’s personal life. But this job was different than any he’d ever taken on before. And this was Miss Viv.

      Everybody was a poor child to her. His need to analyze, to have answers to puzzles, surprised him by not filing this poor child information under strictly personal, none of his business, nothing to do with the job at hand. Instead, he allowed the question to form in his mind. If a man believed in the fairy tale enough to ask someone like Molly Michaels to be his wife, why would he then be fool enough to let her get away?

      Because the truth was lovely was an unfortunate understatement, and would have been even before he had made the mistake of making the bridal vision somehow real by touching the heated silk of Molly’s skin, the coiled copper of her hair.

      Molly’s eyes, the set of her sensuous mouth and the corkscrewing hair, not to mention the curves of a slender figure, had not really said lovely to him. Despite the fairy tale of the dress the word that had come to mind first was sexy.

      Was that what had made him get up from his chair? Not really to rescue her from her obvious discomfort, but to see what was true about her? Sexy? Or innocent?

      He was no Boy Scout, after all, not given to good deeds, which was another reason he should not be here at Second Chances.

      Still, was his need to know that about Molly Michaels personal or professional? He had a feeling at Second Chances those lines had always been allowed to blur. Note to self, he