Spare Change (Wyattsville #1)(6)

m about to marry Mister Doyle, I said to the gypsy, and need to know if he’s a man who will love me forever. Keeping that question in mind, she had me pull a card from the deck; then laid a crisscross of other cards alongside of it. Right off, she said the cards showed I had a terrible dislike of anything having to do with the number eleven. Well, I was about to explain, it was with good reason, but before I got a word out, she pointed to the card with a picture of eleven cups and said one was tilted to the sky, which meant the number eleven would someday bring a blessing. Not likely, I thought, but still, there was something about the woman—the way her eyes looked right past me and focused in on things from another time. It’s said that only gypsies have the true gift of looking at a person and seeing their future, so I was happy as a red hen when she said a man named Doyle would be loving me for the whole of my life and then some.

Could a woman ask for any more than that?





A Dinner to Die For

Charlie’s apartment had the look and feel of a bachelor’s place—Esquire Magazines stacked high on the end table, pipes scattered about a wooden rack meant to contain them, overstuffed chairs with the indentation of his behind still in them. Despite all of this, Olivia began to think of the place as home the minute she entered. She hung her dresses in the closet, set her perfume bottles on the bureau and placed her toothbrush in the bathroom holder alongside Charlie’s.

“Don’t bother doing that stuff right now,” Charlie said. He circled his arms around her, playfully tugged her blouse loose from the waistband of her skirt and slid his hands across the bare skin of her back. “First things first,” he whispered and pressed her tight to his chest.

Olivia felt the thumping of his heart; it was synchronized to precisely match the beat of hers. Love you, the hearts drummed—love you, love you, love you. Charlie eased open the row of buttons on her blouse and kissed her neck. He continued for a good long while, then led her off to the bedroom. Twining themselves together, they climbed into bed and he kissed her in every spot imaginable. Then, in the bright of day, with the sun shining in on them, they made love. While other husbands were watching the final innings of a baseball game and housewives were basting a roasted chicken, they fell deeper and deeper in love.

This was a day more special than anything Olivia had ever dreamed; it was a day to be forever held in memory, a day that she would keep for all the years of her life. Trying to hold onto the moment, she took the bedside clock, turned it face down and buried it in the bottom of a drawer—but hiding time is not a thing that will slow it. Moment by moment the sun slid behind the horizon as a dusky twilight settled into the sky. When the sky was black as a raven’s eye and only minutes of their wedding day remained, Olivia suggested they jump into the blue convertible and start for Miami Beach that very night. But as fate would have it, Charlie’s friends had arranged a round of parties in their honor. “When they’ve gone to all this trouble,” he explained, “it would downright rude for us to not attend.” She agreed, although somewhat reluctantly.

For the next five days Charlie squired a smiling Olivia from place to place, introducing her to the ladies of the Wyattsville Social Club. “It broke our hearts when an outsider stole our Charlie away,” Emily Carter whispered jokingly. Barbara MacIntyre made a similar comment. The widow Mulligan latched on to Olivia’s arm and started asking about the secret for capturing such an eligible bachelor.

“Secret?” Olivia said, “There’s no secret. I simply fell in love with him.”

“Love?” Widow Mulligan replied, “At your age?”

Six days after the wedding, Charlie carted four suitcases downstairs and packed them into the trunk of his blue convertible. He tucked a road map into the glove compartment and slid behind the wheel then he and Olivia headed for Miami Beach, Florida. “We’ll take our time,” he told her, “drive seven hours or so, then stop for the night. By Monday we’ll be sunning ourselves on the beach.”

Olivia, a bit nervous about travelling such a distance in a convertible, counted up the number of days they’d be on the road—three. Fine, she thought, figuring that would bring them to the ninth day of their marriage, by the eleventh day they would have arrived safely in Miami Beach. She smiled and snuggled closer to Charlie, contemplating the three overnight stays at quaint little roadside inns.

The first night they stopped in Fayetteville, North Carolina. They’d driven the full length of the road looking for a place to stay—a Cozy Inn or Honeymoon Haven—but the only spot with a room available was Sleep Planet, a motel fashioned after a space ship. “It’s not what I’d imagined,” Olivia said, her lower lip quivering.

Charlie took hold of her and kissed her in such a way that the lopsided bed seemed somehow to level itself and the worn spot on the carpet became nearly invisible. “Once we get to Miami Beach,” he whispered, “we’ll spend fourteen days at the Fontainebleau, now, there’s a place you’re gonna love.”

Love? Olivia didn’t need another thing to love—she had Charlie, what more could a woman ask? He was a man who watched out for her, did things to please her, saw to her needs. Finding a man such as Charlie was the reason that she, a person who had never relied on a soul other than herself, had fallen head over heels in love. “A woman doesn’t need to love the place she sleeps,” she sighed seductively, as they climbed into bed, “when she’s so in love with the man sleeping alongside of her.”