Free His 1-800 Wife by Shirley Hailstock

she would miss in her sham of a marriage. What deception really meant. They weren't deceiving everyone else. The deceit was all internal. And she was going to have to live with it.
     
    ***
     
    Concentration was out of the question today. Jarrod had a desk full of work to get done. Blue prints spilled from his drafting board onto the floor. Designs for buildings in various stages of completeness could not keep his attention. His return to Rhode Island brought him back to the firm that had sent him to England, but it took only days to become routine and full. Yet Jarrod couldn't think of work. His mind was elsewhere, lost on a dining-room floor in a small house only a few miles from where he sat. He'd relived that kiss a hundred times in the past three days. It and Catherine were taking over his entire life.
    The problem was, he hadn't intended to kiss her. He hadn't expected their light banter to land them on the floor, but instinctively his hands had reached for her when she started to fall. Then everything took on a life of its own.
    You'd think he'd have learned by now. He was twenty-nine, not nineteen. Men and women didn't play together unless they were both prepared for the consequences. Catherine had explained the rules. And kissing her wasn't allowed, not unless it was neces­sary, prompted by an audience, expected by a crowd, not when they were alone. Yet her hair had intrigued him, especially the way she kept flipping it over her shoulder.
    He should have known better than to start playing with her. He had plenty of history that told him noth­ing ever went as planned with Catherine. When he'd intentionally hit the tennis ball onto the lawn and she ran to get it moments before the sprinklers came on, she slipped and hit her head. He spent half the day in the emergency room, then the other half keep­ing her awake all night to make sure she was all right. When she was sixteen, he hired an ice cream truck to come to her birthday party, but instead the male strippers he'd hired for another party showed up. He never thought her mother would get over that, especially when Catherine wanted to date one of the strippers.
    He ran his tongue over his tooth, physical evidence of another prank gone wrong. This time he'd been the one in the emergency room when their sailboat had cracked up on the rocks near Benton Point and he'd been thrown head first onto a rock.
    And now he was in a quandary. What was he to do about Catherine? He could back out of this, claiming they didn't know each other well enough. But weren't engagements a time for people to get to know each other? Couldn't they say they'd discovered their mar­riage just wasn't going to work out and they found out before any real harm was done?
    Jarrod stared blankly at the blueprint in front of him. He'd been looking at it for nearly an hour and felt as if he'd never seen it before. Everything about the blue and white lines was like a foreign language to his brain. He'd worked with men who had one-track minds. He always prided himself on being able to juggle several things at one time, but he was no longer earning his keep. Catherine consumed his thoughts like a jealous goddess, demanding his full and undivided attention.
    He thought more about breaking their engage­ment. For both their sanity, it was the right thing to do. But would Catherine understand? She was convinced Audrey and her mother were out to find her a man, any man; they just wanted her married. Jarrod under­stood. He'd seen Audrey in action more than once, and when she combined forces with her mother there was no stopping them. But Catherine had managed to elude any unwanted proposals up to this point. She could continue doing it. Or. . .he stopped. He could find her someone else to marry. That would get him off the hook.
    Jarrod forgot the plans on his desk and started thinking of the men they both knew, someone who was compatible with Catherine—just enough to make her family believe she could fall