Cinderella's Midnight Kiss. Dixie Browning
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too small, and when Aunt S. catches her in them, she makes her give them to me. Same with T-shirts. Tight. Maura likes to show off her boobs, but I don’t have any yet. I don’t really like jeans very much, they’re hot in the summertime and cold in the winter, but I guess they’re pretty practical.
“Steff never wears jeans. She gives me dresses she doesn’t want, usually the fancy kind that have to be dry-cleaned. Definitely not practical! Luckily, I’m good at mending and spot-cleaning, which they almost always need by the time I get them.
“You might have noticed I tend to ramble a lot. Mama used to say I had a brain like an overgrown flower garden. There’s good stuff in it if you can ever find it under all the weeds.
“For the record, though, I’m truly grateful for Aunt S.’s kindness, which is why I can’t just walk away and get on with my life, as much as I’m tempted to.”
Oh, how many times she’d been tempted, but soon now…very soon, she would be ready.
“Well, Diary, here comes the hard part. It concerns something Aunt S. knew all along, but I didn’t find out until years later when I finally got up the nerve to read Mama’s diary. Which is one of the reasons I’m doing this—to set the record straight so my children and grandchildren, if any, will know what’s what.
“I’m not a real Danbury. My biological father was a navy pilot who crashed on a training mission before I was even born. Mama said his name was Bill Jones and he was from somewhere in Virginia, which doesn’t help much, but there it is, anyway.
“When Daddy married Mama, he gave me his name, which is probably why Aunt S. took me to live with her. Uncle Henry didn’t mind. About Uncle Henry—he wears three-piece suits and walks to the office every morning and walks home every afternoon for a cigar, a drink and a nap. Maura looks a lot like him, but she’s not as kind.”
With a sigh, Cindy laid the diary aside and stared out the window at the house next door. Hitch was coming back. Which was why she’d dug out her old diary in the first place—because John Hale Hitchcock had figured in so many of her girlish fantasies back in her diary-keeping days.
When Mac had told her Hitch had agreed to be his best man, she’d nearly drowned in all those old daydreams. She would die of embarrassment if he ever found out, but he probably wouldn’t even recognize her. She wasn’t sure he’d really noticed her in those days, yet even after ten years she could remember him as if it had been only yesterday.
Of course, he’d have changed—he might even be married, although Mac hadn’t mentioned a wife. But then, she herself had changed since the days when she’d thought he hung the moon. Not a whole lot, but at least she was no longer built like an ironing board.
Skimming over the middle part of the worn diary, Cindy picked up at her eighteenth birthday.
“Uncle Henry gave me my own car! I can’t believe it! Now instead of bicycling all over town to do my Monday errands, I can drive. Maybe I should paint a sign on the side—something like Send Cindy, She’s Fast, Reliable and Cheap.
“Aunt S. would have a hissy-fit.”
Her uncle had died before her next birthday. She still missed him. “I think Aunt S. knows anyway,” Cindy had written all those years ago. “The reason she doesn’t say anything is because then she might have to give me an allowance to buy the stuff I absolutely have to have. I’ve done my best to earn my keep all these years by making myself useful, but I’ll tell you this much, Diary. I might end up an old maid, but no way will I ever let Maura or Steff fix me up with another blind date. The one last month nearly tore my dress off. The one last week told dirty jokes and laughed when I blushed, and last night’s date was so boring I nearly fell asleep while he was telling me about every job he ever held, from bag boy right on up to produce manager. I might not be rich or well-bred or pretty, but I deserve better than that.”
That was one thing that hadn’t changed, Cindy told herself, laying the diary aside again. She deserved whatever she could make of her life. Once Steff’s wedding was over, she was going to find a tiny apartment she could afford and turn her Monday job into a full-time thing until she saved enough to launch her dream career. One day, women would go back to wearing gorgeous, feminine, romantic hats, and when that happened, she would be ready.
If she still had enough energy left after this blasted wedding!
Chapter One
John Hale Hitchcock quietly hung up the phone and began to swear. He’d finally said yes, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have serious reservations. All his adult life he’d made it a policy to stay as far away from weddings as possible in case they were contagious. Especially weddings that required his active participation. What was it the shrinks called it? A defense mechanism?
Yeah, it was that and more.
He’d always had a feeling his own parents hated each other’s guts, but were far too well bred to mention it. Add to that his mother’s sporadic attempts to pair him up with one of her colleagues and it was no wonder he’d developed a jaded outlook on marriage.
He’d eventually learned to handle such things tactfully. In spite of his parents’ dismay when he’d chosen engineering over law, Georgia Tech over Yale, he wasn’t a barbarian. At least he’d had the good manners not to come right out and admit to harboring a deep-seated aversion to pinstripes, brogans and button-down brains, a description that summed up those among his mother’s younger female colleagues who considered her a role model. Now a highly esteemed federal judge, Janet Hale Hitchcock had never, not even in her junior-partner days, been a hands-on type mother.
Once she’d given up trying to hand over control of her only son to one of her right-minded colleagues, her matchmaking efforts had ceased. Now it was only his married friends who were forever trying to pair him up. Hitch put it down to the theory that misery liked company. His method of dealing with it was both tactful and efficient. Smile politely and run like hell. Having spent his formative years under the thumbs of domineering parents, in a home that had all the warmth of a refrigerator truck, he wasn’t about to get caught in the marriage trap.
Mac’s call had caught him at a weak moment. He’d just come back from a memorial service for another old classmate, dead of heart failure at the age of thirty-three, a year younger than Mac.
Life was risky business.
After pouring himself a drink, Hitch had been wallowing in a rare moment of philosophical nostalgia when Mac MacCollum had called to tell him about his upcoming wedding and ask him to act as best man.
“No thanks, my friend. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m severely allergic to weddings.”
“Aw, come on, Hitch, you’re my closest pal. I couldn’t ask anyone else.”
The two men had gone through four years at Georgia Tech together, Hitch on a football scholarship as his parents, both Yale law school graduates, had refused to condone such heresy. The day after graduation Mac and Hitch had joined the army together. Mac had then tried on half a dozen careers, while Hitch went to Harvard for his MBA. Through it all they’d never lost contact, due mostly to Mac’s friendly persistence.
“You know, Mac,” Hitch had remarked, “whining was never one of your more attractive traits.”
“I’m not whining, man, I’m begging. Begging has more dignity than whining.”
“Do I know the lucky lady?”
“You remember Steffie Stephenson? Lives next door to our house?”
Hitch would never forget the many weekends during their college years he’d spent in the rambling, friendly, comfortable old house in a small North Carolina town. The MacCollums’ place, messy, noisy, filled with the aroma of Mama Mac’s good cooking, was as different from the house he’d grown up in as night from day.
He also remembered the Stephenson sisters next door, Stephanie and…was it Mary? Marnie? Something