The Marriage Conspiracy by Christine Rimmer

Author:Christine Rimmer [Rimmer, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Single Mothers, Companionate Marriage, Contemporary, General, Romance, Fiction, Custody of Children
ISBN: 9780373244232
Google: aNqwzaAMtToC
Publisher: Silhouette Books
Published: 2001-10-14T13:00:00+00:00

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Chapter 10

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Dekker rarely would talk about Stacey. But Joleen knew most of the story, anyway.

After all, Stacey had been Joleen's friend first. And when things got bad, Joleen was the one Stacey came to in her misery, the one Stacey confided in.

And Stacey had not always been so … difficult. So desperate and sad. At the beginning, well, she was really something. So much fun…

Like a sudden light in a dark room, blinding but welcome. That was Stacey. Joleen had been drawn to her from the moment they met – at Central States Academy of Cosmetology, when they were both nineteen.

There was something purely magical about Stacey. Something bigger than real life. It was as if she wove a spell, with the music of her laugh and the aura that surrounded her, an aura of excitement and … what? Specialness, maybe.

Stacey was everything Joleen wished she could let herself be. Stacey never had small emotions. She cried and laughed with total abandon. She never fretted. Never worried – or that was how she came across at first. She and Joleen were about the same size, both had brown hair and dark eyes. But the resemblance ended there.

Stacey was a little like Joleen's mother and sisters. Prone to making big drama out of the smallest events. Stacey loved roller coasters, for heaven's sake. And she had a tattoo, which had seemed to Joleen to be so wonderfully brazen and daring. At tattoo of a blood-red snowflake, low down on her back, so low down it was really more on her bottom – the left side, just above the dimple.

"Snowflakes are the most perfect, most beautiful thing in nature," Stacey told Joleen. "And no two of them are ever alike. And they don't last, they are gone in a moment, melting on your tongue. Except for my snowflake. I'll have it my whole life."

Which, as it turned out, hadn't been all that long.

The truth was, Dekker and Stacey were a disaster together. Their love was hot and passionate and all consuming. Their marriage had been a runaway train – something big and powerful and out of control, plummeting down from the crest of a high mountain, headed for a crash of stupendous proportions.

And Joleen was the one who had introduced them. On Easter Sunday. At her mama's house.

Stacey didn't have any family to speak of. Her parents had divorced when she was seven. Her mother had remarried and lived in Colorado somewhere. Stacey didn't know where her dad was. She hadn't seen him in ten years, she said. Stacey said she loved how, even though Joleen's dad had died, the family hadn't broken up. Joleen and her mother and her sisters still shared the family home. Joleen had aunts and uncles, from both sides, and they all got together on a regular basis. Stacey said she longed for that kind of family connection.

Stacey came for dinner that Easter, when she and Joleen were both nineteen. And Dekker came, too.

He'd been a little late, as Joleen remembered it.

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