The Carson Springs Trilogy: Stranger in Paradise, Taste of Honey, and Wish Come True Read Free Page A

behind her now. Life without Martin had settled into a pattern. She had her house and business, the music festival committee. There wasn’t room for the kind of passion she’d yearned for when young.
    The realization brought a trace of melancholy that was quickly dispelled by the Bach cantata now echoing through the church, accompanied by the joyous pealing of campanario bells. As she rose to her feet, Sam felt as if she were being literally borne upward. She caught the eye of the best man, Wes’s son, with his blond hair to his shoulders and silver stud in one ear, and thought she saw a touch of irony in the glance he shot her. Ian was only a few years older than Alice. What must he think of all this?
    Sam fell into step behind him. Laura and the three bridesmaids, old friends of Alice’s, marched ahead of them in a rose-colored column with the bride and groom leading the way. Sam smiled into the blur of beaming faces on either side of her. The church, eternally cool, its hand-hewn timbers imbued over the ages with the scent of smoke and incense, seemed to fold about her like a pair of tired wings.
    The church doors swung open, flooding the aisle with sunshine. There was a moment, a single moment before anyone caught up to them, when Alice and Wes stood poised on the steps outside, a fairy-tale prince and princess framed by the arched doorway as if by the gilt edges of a book. Sam’s throat tightened. She thought, Is there really such a thing as happily ever after?
    Then she was outside, taking her place in the receiving line, extending her hand and cheek to the guests who spilled from the church like excited children from school. Her sister and brother-in-law, Audrey and Grant, with their two college-age sons, Joey and Craig. Her brother, Ray, and his wife, Dolores, all the way from Dallas. Ray and Dolores’s two married daughters, followed by elderly Uncle Pernell and Aunt Florine, clutching as tightly to each other as to their respective canes.
    Wes’s parents, both hale and hearty, with the deep tans of avid golfers, stood to her right—an uncomfortable reminder that her own hadn’t lived to see this day. She pictured them as they’d looked in the photo taken on their last anniversary: a tall, thickset man with a balding crown stooping into the camera’s range, his cheek pressed to that of his petite, white-haired wife. What would they have thought of this unlikely match?
    Sam’s best friend stepped up to give her a Chanel-scented squeeze. In her wide-brimmed straw hat and fitted emerald suit Gerry Fitzgerald seemed straight out of a forties movie. No one who didn’t know her would ever have guessed she was a former nun.
    “You’re holding up well,” she said.
    “Am I?” Sam drew back with a self-conscious little laugh.
    “When it’s my turn, they’ll have to issue a flood warning.” That wouldn’t be for a while, they both knew. Gerry’s daughter, the oldest of her two children, was only fifteen.
    Sam’s gaze strayed toward Alice, warmly embracing her bridegroom’s much stouter older brother, who could have passed for Wes’s father. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
    “I could swear I was looking at you on your wedding day.”
    A long-ago image flashed through Sam’s head: a pretty, dark-haired college girl, much too young to be getting married, wearing her mother’s satin wedding gown taken in at the waist. She smiled. “I’m glad one of us remembers that far back.”
    “We’re not that old.” Gerry shook her head, green eyes sparkling with laughter. With her ex-husband and string of lovers, she liked to joke that she was disgracefully aging.
    “Old,” Sam said with a wry, downward glance, “is a corsage without a man to pin it on.”
    Gerry cast a meaningful look at Tom Kemp, in line behind her. “I can think of someone who’d be more than happy to take on the job,” she murmured.
    Sam felt her face grow warm, then her husband’s former partner was stepping up to kiss her