Paradise Found Read Free Page A

tomorrow if I didn’t?’
    The slant of his mouth was doubting, but he merely said, ‘And how about Tony? Does he love you?’
    â€˜He says he does, and he’s never given me cause to disbelieve him.’
    His gaze locked with hers for a heart-stopping moment; then his expression went curiously blank. ‘In that case, there’s nothing more to be said.’ With that he turned on his heel and left.
    But Zoe wasn’t convinced that he had meant it. She locked the door after him, then wandered back into her bedroom, needing to look at her wedding dress . . . She touched it for reassurance but got none. It was a beautiful dress. Since she didn’t have a mother of her own, Tony’s mother, Matt’s sister Nerissa, had gone with her to help with the choice. Yet she had needed no help. It had been the first one she tried on once she decided to go all out and get a gown, and it was perfect for her in every way. Done in pure ivory, it was classically simple, and while it showed her figure off to its best advantage, it was also demurely right for the occasion.
    For a long time she had had the feeling that everything was going too well for her and had been suspicious of it. She experienced no earth tremors when she was with Tony, but she felt a deep and warm affection for him, and when he had asked her to marry him, it had seemed right to say yes.
    She could never be sure why she had agreed to go out with him when he first asked her for a date. She had known that he was Matt’s nephew, and even if she hadn’t had positive knowledge of that fact, there would still have been a certain poignancy in their similar looks. Both were tall, with wide shoulders and deeply muscled chests. Matt had the narrower waist and hips, but he exercised more and didn’t indulge to excess in food and drink. If Tony didn’t pay more attention to his diet and moderate his drinking, or if some caring woman didn’t take him in hand, he would have a paunch by the time he was Matt’s age. Zoe firmly believed that when she was his wife her loving influence would take care of that. Tony’s hair wasn’t as fiercely virile or as dark as Matt’s, and his eyes weren’t black but more of a dark, spaniel brown, but they were enough alike for it to be self-inflicted pain for Zoe to be with him and look at him.
    She had never quite got over Matt, so the question was often in her mind, did she go out with his paler reflection as a next-best substitute, or as punishment for taking too long to recover from her hopeless infatuation? Whatever the reason, very gradually, over the months, Tony’s own beguiling personality had infringed itself upon her awareness, and she had begun to accept him, faults and all, for himself, had grown to like him and be very fond of him.
    For Tony’s sake, Zoe went out of her way to like Tony’s mother. Nerissa Talbot hadn’t been widowed all that long, and it was natural for a newly bereaved woman to cling to her only son. Zoe made allowances for both of them, guessing that Nerissa had always been overprotective and appreciating that this could account for the streak of weakness in Tony. Nerissa had taken the wind out of Zoe’s sails by admitting as much herself while taking pains to point out that she would do her utmost not to be an interfering mother-in-law, and grandmother when the time came, and that it was her dearest wish that she would find a friend in her daughter-in-law. That was fine by Zoe. Kind of comforting. There had still been the stumbling block of Matt, but she’d managed to still any tiny voice of disquiet in that quarter.
    It was strange the way Tony never spoke of Matt. After all, Matt was his boss as well as his uncle. On the rare occasion when Matt’s name did filter into the conversation, there was a bitterness in Tony’s tone that was unattractive. At the risk of being disloyal to her fiancé, she wondered