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Authors: Janelle Taylor

BOOK: Dying To Marry
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Jake Boone's sweet seventeen-year-old face came into mind.
“It doesn't matter what people say you are, Holly. It only matters who
you
know you are,
” Jake would say over and over. “
Screw them!”
he'd add vehemently, slamming a fist down on the table or the ground. “One day, when I'm a cop, I'm going to catch one of them spitting on the sidewalk or tossing a gum wrapper into the street or jaywalking, and I'm going to arrest them and throw them in jail!”
Jake Boone. It had been ten long years since she'd seen him, but not since she'd thought about him. What she'd said the last night she saw him, prom night, still shamed her, still caused her to suck in her breath at how misguided she'd been. She wondered where he was now, what he was doing. If he still had to constantly push his thick dark hair out of his eyes. He'd had aspirations of being a cop like his father and grandfather, and Holly wondered if that dream had come true.
As the train began to pull away, Holly waved good-bye to Ellie and Herbert, who stood with one arm around each other and one arm waving at Holly. At times like this, crazy times, when the world didn't seem to make sense, Holly would long for her own partner, a husband. But in the past ten years, since living on her own, Holly hadn't really connected with anyone, even though she'd met much nicer men than the belcher. Once, she'd overheard a few teachers talking about her in the teachers' lounge at school; they were surprised that “such a pretty woman” had no life to speak of or that the male teachers weren't beating down her classroom door for a date. One of the women sitting at the table had said it was because Holly was
prickly
—that was the exact word she'd used—a little standoffish; not so much with women, but with men, as though she didn't trust them.
She must have gotten hurt real bad once
, added the woman.
More than once
, probably, said another.
And that'll do it
, the third woman had put in.
Yes, that'll do it
, Holly thought. What she wouldn't give to feel someone's strong arm around her shoulder. Someone to share things with, be with. Someone who'd see through the prickly attitude, the false primness, the veneer of tailored, conservative clothes.
The way Jake Boone used to
, she thought, leaning back against the headrest. For a few minutes, Holly let herself think of Jake, those dark blue eyes framed by dark, dark lashes, his voice, deep for a boy of seventeen, his muscular arm slung over her shoulder in friendship.
At least Jake Boone won't be in Troutville this weekend,
Holly thought. She had no doubt that he'd hightailed it out of town the moment he could, just as she'd had, and that he'd never looked back, just as she hadn't.
You
are
looking back, Holly,
she realized.
CHAPTER TWO
The cloying scent of whatever awful perfumes Pru Dunhill and Arianna Miller wore hit Jake Boone full in the face as he stepped onto the outdoor platform at the Troutville train station.
Stop. Turn back. Run!
he warned himself, but it was no use. A client's train was due in at nine-thirty, and Jake had promised to meet the man on the platform. Besides, it was too late; Pru and Arianna had spotted him.
“Why, if it isn't Jake Boone in the flesh,” Pru said, her thin, pink-glossed lips stretched into a smile.
Why Pru Dunhill couldn't speak like a normal person was beyond Jake. She was always saying things like,
Why, Jake Boone, I do declare that you're looking very handsome today
. Her brother Dylan, who had become one of Jake's best friends after graduation, had told Jake that their mother had encouraged Pru from birth to conduct all conversations as though she were being interviewed on stage for the Miss America pageant. Pru had clearly listened to her mother. And decided that she was representing a southern state rather than New Jersey.
She smoothed her long, wavy blond hair. “Arianna and I are waiting for the train from New York City. We have a girlfriend coming in for the weekend.” She suddenly dropped the stack of magazines in her arms. “Oops. Arianna, didn't I say I shouldn't try to carry so many magazines? But that's me, always striving to do more than I possibly can.”
Jake had to restrain himself from bursting out laughing at the absurdity of that. Pru went from the beauty salon to the movies to a friend's house to a restaurant, and that was about the extent of her daily achievements.
Arianna nodded at Pru and toyed with one of her light brown ringlets. “Jake, I always tell Pru she has way too much on her plate, but will she listen? No, no, no, she just keeps on, helping, helping, helping. She absolutely insisted on meeting the train this morning to collect our friends herself instead of sending her family's driver. I tell you, Pru is going to make someone an incredible wife, Jake. Why, she's willing to do absolutely anything to make the world a better place. Imagine what she'd do for her own husband!”
Jake would really rather not. With a silent sigh, he bent down to pick up the magazines for Pru, as he always did. Whenever they ran into each other, Pru dropped whatever she was carrying, Arianna went on and on about her attributes, and both women waited for Jake to kneel before Pru and admire her legs, her body, her femininity.
And granted, she had a body to admire. Slender, yet curvy, with long legs always enhanced by heels and a dress that whished around just above her knees, Pru Dunhill was considered a hot babe by most of the men Jake knew. A hot babe no one—especially he—could tolerate for longer than five seconds, but a hot babe nonetheless. That she had a crush on him wasn't lost on anyone.
You are one lucky dude—sort of,
his friends said often, running an eye up and down her lovely form, and probably thinking about her trust fund bank account.
He felt anything but lucky at the moment. Jake was a polite man, an adjective that hadn't always described him, and escaping Pru wasn't as easy as nodding a hello and continuing on his way. She wasn't the nicest person in the world—far from it—but she did have strong romantic feelings for him, and that was something that Jake would never handle carelessly, despite his complete lack of interest in her as a woman and a person. Personally, he found her detestable. She'd been cruel to people he cared about, one person in particular. It might have been a long time ago, but Pru was still as disdainful as ever of people she considered beneath her. Back in high school, Jake had been one of those people, and her feelings for him had driven her crazy. She hadn't been just physically attracted to him, the bad boy. She'd liked him, really liked him, and it had tormented her. Prudence Dunhill, one of the wealthiest girls in Troutville, with Jake Boone, Down Hiller and son of a police officer who'd been on disability for years?
That coupling would have been as scandalous then as Dylan Dunhill with Lizzie Morrow was now.
Jake hadn't known about Pru's crush back then. Pru herself had told him on their one and only date a few months ago, when she'd had too much to drink and had draped herself over him during the car ride home. “But you only had eyes for trashy Holly Morrow,” she'd slurred, both literally and figuratively. “I don't know what you saw in that skinny, shy girl in the raggedy hand-me-downs. Yeah, she put out. But I would have, too. A choice between her or me? I mean,
c'mon.
”
Jake knew what he saw in Holly Morrow. And it hadn't taken the mention of her name, the memory of his feelings for her, his love for her, to peel Pru off him and deposit her just inside her front door; Jake would have politely rebuffed her, regardless. The next morning, Pru had called him, giggling about his “taking advantage” of her “low tolerance” for alcohol by making love to her right there in her car, which apparently was what she'd told her friends. Jake had told her five times that nothing had happened, that they hadn't even so much as kissed, but Pru had decided to believe, or decided to pretend, that they had slept together.
That was how easy it was to make up a lie. To make up a lie and share it. And suddenly, something that had never happened
had
happened. Jake knew about the power of lies all too well.
“Thank you soooo much, Jake,” Pru gushed as he handed her the magazines. “I'm planning on bringing these old magazines to the free clinic Down Hill that the less-than-fortunate in Troutville utilize. Even if those folks can't afford the fashions in
Vogue,
they still like to dream,” she added, patting the glossy cover of a beauty magazine.
Jake responded the way he often did to the unbelievable things that came out of Pru Dunhill's shiny pink mouth—by just looking at her in disbelief and wondering, somewhat vaguely, if there was anything inside her resembling a decent human being.
“My goodness, Arianna,” Pru said, staring from the magazine cover to her friend, “You could so easily be a supermodel if you chose to be.”
But Arianna
chose
to do absolutely nothing, other than live off her trust fund and occasionally offer decorating tips to her parents' friends. “Interior decorator” was Arianna's and Pru's supposed profession, but in reality, both women dined, shopped, gossiped all day, and paraded themselves in front of Jake and Dylan Dunhill.
Pru Dunhill was constantly talking up Arianna to Jake. Pru wanted Jake to convince Dylan that Arianna was the woman for him. Pru had been trying to do just that for years with no success. Dylan had dated Arianna in high school and a few times over the years because it was expected by both their families, but he'd never been able to summon any real romantic interest in her. Pru was forever pushing Arianna on Dylan, at family functions, at the mansion, on the streets, everywhere. Even now, when Dylan was spoken for, an engaged man, Pru hadn't stopped. In fact, she seemed to be working double-time to make Dylan see that he'd overlooked Arianna. Which meant that Arianna walked around in very revealing outfits and Pru spent a lot of time making thinly veiled nasty comments about Lizzie Morrow, Dylan's fiancée.
“You are one impossible man to find, Jake Boone,” Pru tsk-tsked with a seductive shake of her head as she stood straight up and turned slightly sideways as she always did to accentuate her chest. She smoothed her hair and twisted a bit on her heels. “Haven't you gotten my messages about the reunion next weekend? I've been calling you all week long.”
“Pru, I have no interest in attending our class reunion. If you're forgetting, we had two very different high school experiences. And besides, I work on the weekends. In fact, I'm working now and I'm late for a meeting, so—”
“Oh, silly Jake,” Pru interrupted, ignoring his need to move along. “You were an entirely different person back then! You would be the
hit
of the reunion. When everyone sees how you've changed, they'll be positively shocked. I mean, no one else in our class went from complete and utter ruffian to a successful Mr. GQ. Everyone from the wrong side of the tracks stayed there. But you showed everyone what a little polish can do. Do try to attend, Jake. I'll save you a dance.”
If that was a promise, he most certainly would not try to attend. Not that he would try, period. He'd already “tried” once with Pru, and that had been more than enough. Why he let Dylan talk him into finally asking out his sister was beyond him. Dylan insisted his sister had some good qualities and that maybe she'd become a normal person if she was happily ensconced in a relationship with the guy she'd loved for twenty years. Their one and only date hadn't been an out-and-out disaster, but Jake didn't like Pru and he never would.
“Dylan's going to the reunion, isn't he?” Arianna asked hopefully. “He's on the list.”
“Yes, he mentioned he's planning to go,” Jake responded, eyeing his watch—a pointless gesture, since the two women had no interest in others' social cues. Such as the fact that Jake was desperate to escape them.
“I suppose he'll be going with Lizzie Morrow,” Arianna said, venom dripping onto the name.
“Well, she is his fiancée, so I imagine so,” Jake said, mentally shaking his head in wonder. Dylan and Lizzie were getting married in three weeks whether Pru or Arianna liked it or not.
Pru mock-shivered. “I will never understand that match. My brother with Lizzie Morrow! My gorgeous, successful brother with that lowlife bimbo. Ick—what he sees in her is beyond me. I mean, the woman is so beneath him!”
“She's totally bottom of the barrel,” Arianna added, tossing her long blond hair behind her shoulder.
Pru leaned in close as if sharing a confidence. “When my mother told me that my brother—the most eligible bachelor in town, in the state, probably—had been carrying on some kind of secret affair with Lay Me Lizzie, I almost dropped dead.”
“Of course he kept it a secret,” Arianna said. “He was obviously
way
too embarrassed to let anyone know he was dating her.”
“Trust me, for Dylan to be engaged to her, she must have something on him,” Pru insisted. “He can tell me he's in love till he's blue in the face, but I know she has something on him. Something really bad. There's no other reason he'd marry her.”
Jake had had more than enough. “Not that I want to dignify any of your sickening conversation with my own two cents,” he said, his stomach turning, “but just what terrible deed do you think Dylan has committed that would be worthy of such blackmail? Did either of you ever stop to think that he simply loves Lizzie? You two should know better than anyone that Dylan Dunhill defers to no one. He's his own man. If he didn't love Lizzie, very much, I might add, he would not be marrying her.”
“Give me a break,” Pru said, rolling her eyes.
“I agree with Pru one hundred percent,” Arianna said. “She is
very
smart. I mean, c'mon, Jake. Why would a man like Dylan want Lizzie? Did you
see
Lizzie today? She's wearing the tackiest outfit I've ever seen—I spotted her a half mile away this morning. First of all, I don't think I've ever seen a skirt that short, that bright, or that cheap-looking. I swear it's made out of a plastic garbage bag or something!”
The two women shared a laugh. “And c'mon, that hair?” Pru said. “How bleached can it get before it all falls out?”
“Lizzie's hair is so big, it'll take forever to all fall out!” Arianna added.
As the women laughed, Jake felt his stomach turn over, as it had been doing since they began their verbal attack on Lizzie Morrow.
“I'm not going to waste my time correcting you both,” Jake said, “But I happen to like Lizzie a lot. And your brother happens to love her,” he added with a sharp glance at Pru. “So why don't you keep your vicious comments to yourselves.”
“Jeez, Jake,” Arianna muttered. “A little harsh.”
“No,” Jake corrected as a train rumbled into the station. “It's the two of you who are harsh—and that's about the weakest word I can think of to describe you both.”
“Whatever,” Arianna snapped. She said something under her breath, but with the roar of the train slowing to a stop, Jake couldn't hear her. His lucky day.
“Oh, come on, Jake,” Pru exclaimed. “Don't be such a fuddy-duddy! C'mon, give us that famous Jake Boone smile. C'mon, let's see it.” She leaned against him and ran a hand along his stomach to tickle him, just above his belt buckle, and pressed her body hard against his. He felt her breasts crush against his chest, and she spread her legs against his leg and leaned even closer against him. “Smile for me, Jake,” she whispered huskily in his ear as she ran a finger along his neck. “C'mon, honey.”
“Get a room!” Arianna shouted with a giggle.
Embarrassed and repulsed, Jake stepped back, but Pru stepped forward and almost stumbled. He reached out to steady her, and she fell into his arms. “There's so much more where that came from, Jake,” she whispered. “You know where I live.”
In a dungeon?
he wanted to say, but held his tongue.

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