IN WHAT WOULD BECOME the girls’ locker room, Marion and Karen helped Stacy into the white lace-and-satin dress that had been worn by both Mrs. Poplar and Marion on their wedding days.
“So you’re going to be my mom,” Karen said. “Finally!”
“And for always,” Stacy said.
Marion looked up from a fray in the gown’s hem that she was stitching.
“Don’t forget I’m your aunt,” she told Karen. She knotted the thread and snapped it off. “I hear the band,” she said. “Bob Pincham’s playing. Says he’s going to do a version of the wedding march that some band named Dogstar would be proud of.”
The two women took Karen’s hands and walked across the hall to the tiny meeting hall that could but barely be called an auditorium.
Stacy paused at the door as everyone turned and gawked. She had been a bridesmaid half a dozen times and had never expected to be a bride. She had planned to live her life enveloped in the free-floating love and respect of a small town. Funny how taking a risk had changed those plans.
From the end of the aisle, Adam’s eyes met hers. He smiled that wonderful smile, that charming smile, that smile that made women feel good all over—but now and forever that smile was just for her.
Just for her.
“Come on,” Karen said, tugging her arm. “We’re never going to get cookies and punch if we don’t get this part over with.”
The ceremony went by in a blur, but something about Stacy, Adam and Karen—and maybe even the whole town—changed. It wasn’t that Stacy became Mrs. Tyler and Adam became a husband. It wasn’t that Karen got herself a mom or that Marion and Jim got themselves in-laws. It wasn’t even that there was love, although it was there and there was lots of it.
No, a funny thing happened at this wedding.
A sort of amnesia swept over the guests. Perhaps it was the droning voice of the reverend. Perhaps it was the heat. Perhaps it was the humidity.
But when the reverend at long last said that the couple could kiss—and then told them a minute later that they could stop kissing and a minute after that told them to stop that stuff right now!—in that time, Adam became a Deerhorn man.
And nobody in Deerhorn, not even Mrs. Stacy Poplar Tyler, could ever remember a time when he was not their home-town boy.
ISBN: 978-1-4592-8115-8
ONE SEXY DADDY
Copyright © 1999 by Arlynn Leiber Presser.
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