Free Beckett's Cinderella by Dixie Browning Page B

and charitable obligations.
    Now she was spending most of her time at the hospital, taking benne seed wafers or whiskey cookies to the nurses, driving his father and his breathing apparatus back and forth and helping his uncle Lanceinterview companions for his aunt Kate, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.
    Close family ties, Beckett thought with a deepened sense of his own mortality, were both a blessing and a burden. He couldn’t imagine being without them. All the same, in these uncertain times he couldn’t imagine a man’s deliberately taking on the responsibility of a wife and kids. Not that there had ever been any guarantees.
    Unlike premature graying, the commitment gene was one that had skipped his generation. Carson showed no more inclination to settle down than he did. Which probably meant the end of this particular branch of Becketts, he admitted with an unexpected shaft of regret. His mother would be disappointed. Already was, for that matter. She’d had her grandkids’ names picked out and waiting for years.
    Idly he wondered if it was family feeling alone that had brought Eliza Chandler from the high-rent district of a big Western city to the boondocks of rural North Carolina. Could be she was trying to outdistance her past, if she’d been a part of her husband’s scams after all. Maybe she’d skated clear by using her looks and that touch-me-not attitude she projected so well. Wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened. On the other hand, she might simply have come to the rescue of an elderly relative.
    He yawned, stretched and thought about replacing the mattress in his old bedroom with a king-size model. But that would mean getting rid of the old mahogany sleigh bed, and his mother would be unhappy. He’d sleep on the carriage-house floor before he’d add to her woes.
    Not that he’d spent all that much time here over the past few years, anyway. If he ever did decide to move his headquarters from Delaware to Charleston, he would definitely need to get a place of his own, else his mother would be running his business instead of just trying to run his life. For all he loved her more than anyone in the world, Becky Beckett was one managing woman. The proverbial steel magnolia.

Five
    I t was two days later when Beckett pulled into the Grants’ driveway. Queen Eliza’s modest chariot was parked close to the house. Beyond that, between the house and a half-grown holly tree, what appeared to be an old Packard was permanently enshrined on four cement blocks. The fact that he even recognized the make made him feel older than his thirty-nine and a quarter years.
    â€œMust be the life I lead,” he muttered as he skirted a ladder propped against the roof, dodged a pot of pink and purple flowers and knocked on the screen door.
    Funny, he mused as he waited for her to answer the door, the way the dilapidated old house looked so familiar. He’d been here, what? Twice? Even thatcrazy old fruit-and-vegetable stand out front, with its homemade counters and bins and its rusted tin roof, looked welcoming. He couldn’t say much for her security system—a flimsy wraparound wall made of hinged lattice panels with a single padlock. But then, maybe fresh produce wasn’t that much of a draw to shoplifters.
    Beckett heard her muttering from somewhere inside the house. He’d tried unsuccessfully to call from New Bern and again from Elizabeth City. She needed an answering machine, if her old rotary dial phone could be retrofitted to support such an accessory.
    â€œReady or not, here I come,” he muttered. He had a twinge in the small of his back from too many hours of driving and he was working on a pressure headache. Both complaints fell off the radar screen the minute he saw her.
    What was it about this particular woman that riveted the attention of every male cell in his body? She was beautiful, sure, but he’d