Persuasion, Captain Wentworth and Cracklin' Cornbread by Hathaway Mary Jane

Author:Hathaway, Mary Jane [Hathaway, Mary Jane]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Christian, General, Romance, Suspense, Thrillers, Fiction
ISBN: 9781476777016
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2014-11-11T08:00:00+00:00

Thus much indeed he was obliged to acknowledge—that he had been constant unconsciously, nay unintentionally; that he had meant to forget her, and believed it to be done. He had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been angry; and he had been unjust to her merits, because he had been a sufferer from them.

—CAPTAIN WENTWORTH

Chapter Eleven

Jem stood at the long window and looked out at the rose garden. He could never have imagined when he left Tupelo that he would stand in this spot, waiting for dinner, being served drinks in the living room. He’d thought moving the Free Clinic to Crawford House would be as bizarre as it could get, but he’d been wrong.

“Do you like martinis?” Paulette went on without waiting for his response. “I just love a good martini. Would you rather have a Deep Blue Sea or a Gummy Worm?”

He turned, glancing over the liquor bottles and fruit-juice containers. “I’m not much of a drinker. If you have water—”

“No, this is a party,” she said, laughing. “My daddy says you should always have party drinks. I’ll make myself a Glamour Girl and you can taste it. I can double the peach schnapps for yours if you like it.” She mixed ingredients in a shaker, listing a constant stream of drink descriptions like a commercial voice-over to the action.

A few minutes later, she was done, popping a maraschino cherry into the light-pink drink. “Here. Try it.” She held it out to him.

Jem shook his head, trying to force his face into a friendly smile. “Go ahead, if that’s your favorite.”

“True, you probably don’t want to get caught holding one of these. They’re not very manly.” She giggled. Taking a gulp, she set it back on the sideboard. “Let me make you something else.”

He wandered to the bookshelf while she worked, half listening to her descriptions of the bars around Tupelo and the bartenders she liked the best and which bouncers were the cutest. He looked over the titles, pausing to touch the spine of a worn copy of W. H. Auden poetry.

“This is probably more your style.” She handed him a bright-blue drink with a triangle of pineapple stuck jauntily to the top. She glanced at the shelf and shook her head. “Better not touch those. Lucy will string you up from the nearest tree.”

“She doesn’t like anyone else to read them?” He frowned at the books. They looked old, for sure, but leather books could last hundreds of years with good care.

“I needed a few pages for this project and she freaked out.” Paulette rolled her eyes and popped a maraschino cherry into her mouth.

“A few pages?”

“I saw the cutest thing on Pinterest where you took a marker and blocked out words to make a poem. I thought if I used a poetry book, it would be easier because, you know, it’s already a poem.”

“So, how did it work out?”

“Um, well.” Paulette took another sip and shrugged. “It’s hard to make a poem out of just a few words, so I left maybe half of them, just the ones I liked.

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