LITMIR.BIZ

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her to be someone different? When her sister, Daphne, had married, Piper thought the pressure would ease, that their mother would be happy to finally have a married daughter. Instead, Mrs. Jamieson was scandalized that her youngest was married, now pregnant, while her oldest didn’t even date.

      As her mom continued to wax ominous about the downfalls of growing old alone, Piper stared vacantly at the dead ficus tree in the corner of her living room. I should water that poor thing. Although, at this point, it was probably more in need of a dirge than H2O.

      “Piper! Are you even listening to me?”

      “Y—mostly.”

      “I asked if that bagel man was still giving you trouble.”

      Mercifully, her mother had moved on to the next topic. Too bad Piper had no idea what that topic was. “Bagel?”

      Then realization dawned. Her mother must mean Stanley Kagle, vice president of Callahan, Kagle and Munroe, the architectural firm where Piper worked as the only female draftsman. Make that draftswoman. In Kagle’s unvoiced opinion, Piper’s job description should be brewing coffee and answering phones with Ginger and Maria, the two secretaries who had been with the firm since it opened. Luckily, Callahan and Munroe held more liberated views.

      “You mean Mr. Kagle, Mom?”

      “Whichever one is always hassling you at work.” She paused. “You know, you wouldn’t have to work at all if you’d find a nice man and raise some babies.”

      Piper could actually hear her blood pressure rising. One of only a handful of female students in her degree program at Texas A&M, she’d busted her butt to excel in her drafting and detailing courses, and was now working even harder to prove herself amid her male colleagues. Why couldn’t her family be proud of that? Proud of her?

      “Mom, I like my job. I like my life. I wish you’d just accept that I’m happy.”

      “How happy could you be? Daphne says you’re underappreciated and that one of your bosses has it in for you.”

      And thank you so much, Daphne, for passing on that information.

      “Daph caught me after a rough week, and I was just venting,” Piper said. “I love the actual drafting part.” And loved the feeling she got when she was in the middle of a drawing and knew it was damn good, the pride of passing a building downtown and seeing one of her suspended walkways. If things continued to go well, Piper was hoping her next review with Callahan would lead to her first project as a team leader.

      But better to argue her point in a language her mom could understand. “I’ll admit to occasional work-related stress, but are you trying to tell me that marriage and motherhood are stress-free?”

      Silence stretched across the phone line.

      Aha! I have you there.

      Then Mrs. Jamieson sighed as though this conversation epitomized her motherhood stress. “Honey, you aren’t getting any younger, and women can’t—”

      Recognizing the introductory phrase of her Don’t You Hear Your Biological Clock Ticking Speech, Piper interrupted. “I’d love to chat more Mom, but…” She thought fast, determined to rescue herself from this black hole of a conversation. “I have to run because I have dinner plans.”

      “You have a dinner date! With a man?”

      Did she really want to lie to her mother? Piper gnawed at her lower lip. She’d already told one white lie. Besides, if it would save her from another round of “you’d be such a pretty girl if you just fixed yourself up,” why not? Her imaginary person might as well be an imaginary man.

      “Yes.” Guilt over the uncharacteristic fib immediately niggled at her, but she pressed forward. “It’s a man.”

      “Good heavens. I can’t believe you let me go on all this time and didn’t say anything about having a boyfriend!”

      Boyfriend? She’d only meant to allude to a dinner date to buy herself some peace and quiet, not invent a full-blown relationship. “Wait, I—”

      “What does your young man look like, dear?”

      Piper blurted the first thing that came to mind. “Tall, dark and handsome.” Oh, very original! “Dark-haired with green eyes,” she elaborated.

      “And you’ll bring him home with you for the reunion, right?”

      “Well, no, I—”

      “We can’t wait to meet him. I was hoping this weekend would give you the chance to get reacquainted with Charlie, but I didn’t know you had a boyfriend.”

      “Charlie?” Piper would invent a dozen fake boyfriends before she let herself go down that road again. “Mom, I don’t want to see Charlie.”

      Her mother’s uneasy silence made it clear that it was too late for Piper to avoid her ex-fiancé.

      “You’ve invited him for dinner or something, haven’t you?” What did it take to convince people that she and Charlie were over? Not over in the-timing-just-wasn’t-right, maybe-later kind of way. Over in the stone-cold, do-not-resuscitate, rest-in-peace kind of way.

      “Piper, he’s like one of the family.”

      More so than she was, it would seem.

      “And I don’t know why you sound so appalled whenever you mention him,” her mother continued. “Charlie Conway is a good man, and he’s the most eligible bachelor in the entire county.”

      That was probably true. Handsome, funny and smart, Charlie Conway had been a fellow Rebecca native and A&M student. He’d been so sought after in high school that Piper had been surprised when he pursued her in college. He’d claimed to love her because she was so refreshingly different from the girls they’d grown up with, and he’d eventually proposed. Their engagement had been strained, however, by his decision to return to Rebecca and carry on the Conway mayoral tradition, and Piper had returned the heirloom diamond ring when she realized that the allure of “refreshingly different” had faded. The longer she’d been with Charlie, the more he’d tried to change her.

      “Mom, I don’t care how eligible he is. He’s not right for me.” She’d tried to explain this before, but since she was rejecting the very lifestyle most of her family and childhood friends had chosen, they didn’t quite understand. Piper knew they were fond of Charlie—she had been, too, at one point—but she hadn’t liked the person she’d become when she was with him. “Promise me you’re not going to spend the weekend trying to throw us together.”

      “Well, of course not, dear—not with this new young man in your life. We can’t wait to meet him!” her mother repeated.

      “I’ll, um, see if he’s available.” Piper hated the blatant dishonesty, but not as much as she hated the thought of an entire weekend explaining why the county’s most eligible bachelor wasn’t good enough for her.

      “This is so exciting,” her mom said. “I can’t wait to call everyone and let them know. Oh, and honey, if you’re going out tonight, I hope you’ll think about wearing a dress for a ch—”

      Ding dong!

      Piper jumped at the unexpected pealing of her doorbell. “Who—” Remembering that she was supposedly expecting a date, she swallowed the last of her question. “Gotta go now, see you this weekend. Love to Dad.”

      The doorbell shrilled again as she hung up, and a familiar male voice called through the door, “Piper? You home?”

      Josh. Thank goodness, because a day like she’d had called for one of two things: venting to her best friend or a Chocomel, a chocolate-covered bar of caramel-and-nougat-filled nirvana. Talking to Josh was calorie-free.

      “Hey,” she greeted him as she opened the door. Joshua Weber was a co-worker who’d become her best friend after moving into her downtown Houston apartment building two

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