Free Tall Tales and Wedding Veils by Jane Graves Page A

Mentally review your CPR training so when you get home and tell your mother the truth, you can bring her back from heart failure.

    And do not, under any circumstances, fall into the hands of a man like Tony McCaffrey ever again.

    Four hours later, Tony shoved his carry-on into the overhead compartment on the airplane, then sat down in his aisle seat and stuffed a pillow behind his head. He’d taken enough aspirin before getting on the plane to gnaw a hole through his stomach lining, but his head was still pounding.

    He turned to see Heather coming up the aisle. The instant their eyes met, she looked away, taking her seat two rows up on the aisle across from him.

    He hated that. He’d expected her to at least speak to him. Then again, he’d also expected her to collapse in a useless heap of emotions this morning, and that hadn’t happened, either.

    Instead, she’d ordered coffee from room service, then got on the phone and changed her plane reservation. After that, she called a twenty-four-hour legal advice line and learned they could complete an online form to get the annulment ball rolling. She told him she’d go to the business center at the hotel to do that. It had amazed him that in spite of her tremendous hangover, she’d still taken control of the situation and handled things quickly and efficiently. He couldn’t fathom how competent she might be if she’d actually been clearheaded.

    Later she went to the airport by herself, and if she hadn’t happened to book a seat near him, he wouldn’t have seen her at all. Besides some distress about passing on the news to her mother, there had been no regrets. No tears.

    Not so much as a wistful backward glance.

    Tony didn’t know whether to be relieved or insulted. Yeah, he wanted out of this mess. And he wanted Heather to want out, but not quite so insistently. Was the idea of being married to him really all that awful?

    Stop it. You’re lucky she’s not a basket case right now, crying her eyeballs out.

    After all, she wasn’t his kind of woman. Right now, she wore a pair of jeans and a blue shirt, but everything about her was beige. Every strand of her long, straight hair was like a soldier lined up for inspection. She wore makeup, but it blended into her face rather than making a statement all its own. She moved in a quiet, reserved manner, as if she’d scripted every step she’d taken since birth. Uptight women bugged him. He never knew what to do to make them happy, because nothing ever did.

    Okay. A gallon of champagne had made this one pretty happy, but how often did a woman like her pop the cork and go after it?

    She buckled herself in, and as they took off, she became the only passenger in the history of air travel to actually watch the flight attendants’ safety speech. Then she pulled a copy of
Forbes
magazine from her tote bag and began to read.

    Forbes?
Weren’t women her age supposed to read
Cosmo
and
Glamour
and that Marie-whatever magazine?

    Definitely
not his kind of woman.

    He leaned his head against the pillow and closed his eyes, but even though he felt tired enough to sleep for a week, he couldn’t doze off. Over the next few hours, he listened to music, ate stale peanuts, sipped a soft drink, and chatted with one of the flight attendants who was friendly beyond the scope of her job responsibilities. When she gave him her phone number, he smiled automatically and stuck it in his shirt pocket. Later he was going to tear it into tiny pieces, shove it into his garbage disposal, and flip the switch. Casual flings had lost their appeal about the time he woke up this morning a married man. Worse, he was a married man who hadn’t even gotten a wedding night to go along with it.

    Oh, hell. What difference did that make? He wouldn’t have remembered it, anyway.

    When they finally landed, Heather got up right away, retrieved her bag from the overhead compartment, and got off the plane ahead of him. When he walked through the jetway