Stryker's Wife. Dixie Browning
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great-aunts had been horrified. A year’s engagement was de rigeur, Aunt Ellen had insisted. Anything less was hardly even decent, according to Aunt Eliza.
If Granna Anne hadn’t passed away the previous spring, Deke might never have been allowed to marry, because Anne Kingsly had been nobody’s pushover. Of all the Kingsly women—Deke’s mother, Deborah, her grandmother, Anne, and her two great-aunts, Eliza and Ellen, Granna Anne had been the only one with any backbone at all. Deke liked to think she had inherited it, but there were times when she wondered, she truly did.
Hers had been a storybook romance. Unfortunately, it hadn’t had a storybook ending. No happily ever after. She’d been so sure that once her family got to know Mark they would love him as much as she did, only there hadn’t been time. First Great-aunt Ellen had died, and then, in less than a year, Great-aunt Eliza had died. Mark had been too busy overseeing a huge development off the coast of South Carolina to help Deke deal with her grief. Not to mention dealing with all the legal red tape of a joint will that had been written before Deke had even been born.
She had begged Mark to help her. He’d promised to look into it just as soon as he could spare a minute. He was always incredibly busy, but then, one of the things that had attracted her in the first place had been his ambition. His aggressiveness. It had been enormously appealing to a woman who’d been trained from the cradle to be pretty, polite and passive.
It had been shortly after that that she’d seen the advertisement for a mail-order course in self-empowerment and assertiveness. If she hadn’t been so worried about her marriage—the gloss seemed to have gone off rather quickly—and overwhelmed by all the legal hocus-pocus she was hearing from her great-aunt’s executor—not to mention her concerns about her second book, which wasn’t coming along as it should…
If it hadn’t been for all that, she never would have sent off for the blasted thing.
Not that it had helped much. When it worked at all it was in fits and spurts, usually when she least expected it. She still blamed Lesson Two for what happened when she’d asked Mark if they could please start a family. Empowerment is the birthright of every woman, the first paragraph had stated. It is important to express your needs in unequivocal language.
So she had. An only child, Deke had desperately wanted babies of her own. She’d said so.
Mark had laughed. He’d told her she was child enough for him, and that it was about time she grew up because she was beginning to bore him with her childish demands.
That had hurt her feelings. With all the dignity and empowerment she could summon, she had asked why he had married her if he hadn’t wanted a family.
“Why? God knows. Maybe because you were a virgin and that’s a pretty rare commodity in this day and age.”
“You couldn’t possibly have known that—not then, at least.”
“Ah, come on, honey, you were practically advertising the fact. The way you dressed—the way you talked—even the way you sat there, with your knees together and your feet flat on the floor, like you were scared to death a fly would buzz up your petticoat.”
It wasn’t true. None of it. Oh, it was true enough that she’d been a virgin, but she’d been wearing a sophisticated new outfit, a new hairstyle and a new shade of lipstick in honor of her very first autographing when they’d met.
Besides, things like that didn’t show…did they? “I don’t believe you,” she’d said flatly.
Mark had sneered. There was no other way to describe it. “You were a novelty, darling, but let’s face it—novelties wear off, so be a good little girl and get off my back, will you?”
That was when the mail-order course had kicked in. She’d thrown a vase of roses at him. A Steuben vase. It had been a wedding gift, and Mark had known to the penny how much it had cost, which she’d thought rather crass at the time, but of course, by then, her training had quit cold on her, so she hadn’t told him so.
Never go to bed angry. That, along with that business about turning the other cheek, was one of her great-aunts’ favorite sayings.
So Mark had slammed out, and Deke had waited up, unable to sleep until she had apologized and smoothed things over between them.
He hadn’t come home at all. The next day his partner had called to tell her that Mark had gone out of town on another business trip and wouldn’t be home until the following Tuesday.
Still furious, hurt and determined to get over both, she had applied herself to packing away her great-aunts’ clothing to give to the church’s Helping Hand Society.
And then word came that Mark had been killed in a plane crash.
Deke had run the gamut of emotions. Remorse, regret, anger, denial, grief—although not necessarily in that order. Suddenly, she’d found herself completely alone, without family and dangerously short on resources. In the midst of all that, poor old Mr. Hardcastle, her own family lawyer, had come to inform her that he had finally finished settling her great-aunts’ convoluted estate, and that, my how he wished he had insisted they update their will, but then, the Misses Ellen and Eliza had been a law unto themselves, hadn’t they?
The Kingsly home place, where Deke and her father and his entire family had grown up, was now the property of a distant cousin from Cleveland, who intended to put it on the market immediately because he needed the money.
The furniture was to be auctioned off, all except for one or two personal bequests.
On the heels of dealing with all that had come the news that the house she had shared with Mark had been leased in the name of the jointly owned development firm, of which Mark’s older brother, Hammond, was not only the legal counsel, but senior partner and major shareholder.
Deke had blamed herself for not becoming more informed while there’d still been time. She had blamed that darn course in self-assertiveness for letting her down and for her last quarrel with Mark. She still felt guilty over that. It was the last time she had ever seen him.
However, having no other choice, she had picked up the pieces and got on with her life. Not particularly gracefully, but at least she’d managed to deal with things as they came.
And boy, had they come! The minute word of Mark’s death got out, people she had never even met had swarmed all over her, taking over, talking over her head, going though things, shoving papers under her nose for her to sign. Hammond, who might have been more supportive, had been among the worst.
After all three estates had been finally settled with all the whereases and heretofores and bequeathings—goodness, the process took forever!—Deke had ended up with her husband’s camera and his last name, and her grandmother’s parlor organ, which was seven feet tall and weighed a ton.
Not that she could play a note, because she couldn’t. And even if she could, the bellows wheezed, but all the same, she appreciated the sentiment.
By then, of course, she had been informed that although state law allowed the widow a portion of her late husband’s assets, when those assets were corporate assets, and the corporation was privately held by a partner who was not only a lawyer but a relative, and when her late husband had allowed his life insurance to lapse rather than pay the premiums that had increased dramatically when it was discovered that both his blood pressure and his cholesterol levels were in the stratosphere—why, then, there was really nothing much the state could do.
Deke hadn’t pushed. She’d still been feeling guilty on too many counts, including the fact that once the initial shock had worn off, she’d been more angry than grieved.
It had been the most hectic period in her life, what with everything piling on at once. Tomorrow would be the second anniversary of the day Mark’s plane had gone down off a place called Swan Inlet, killing him and the secretary who’d been traveling with him. The time had come to bid a proper farewell to her late husband and get on with the rest of her life.
Unfortunately,