Free Wanted: Wife by Gwen Jones Page A

silky pass, ending with the tiniest of nips to the corner of my mouth. It was quick and chaste yet undeniably possessive. “Mrs. Devine,” he said softly, lifting my hand to kiss it.
    I felt a little swoony, not even realizing I had closed my eyes. Mrs. Devine . . . I thought . . . Mrs. Devine . Then all at once my breath caught. Holy crap— Mrs. Devine!
    A second later I saw myself signing the license, shaking Mrs. DeForest’s and the mayor’s hands, and then being shuttled out the door. “Thanks, Paul, Mrs. DeForest,” Andy said, leaving a hundred dollar bill on the counter. He hefted my suitcases. “Have dinner on me.”
    “Wait!” Mrs. DeForest cried. She reached into her purse, pulling out a camera. “You have to remember the day!”
    Andy leaned into me and she snapped a picture, then he grabbed the suitcases and me, and we ran toward the door.
    “Goodbye!” Andy said.
    “Thanks!” the mayor called after us. “And congratulations you two!”
    “To the bride it’s always ‘good luck,’” Mrs. DeForest corrected him. “’Congratulations are for the groom. After all, it’s he who’s won her.”
    That simple statement was so pregnant with implications that my head fairly spun, but now wasn’t the time for analysis—especially with Andy tossing my suitcases in the back of his truck and stuffing me into the passenger seat. “Maybe you should call Jinks and see how he’s doing,” I said.
    “Can’t,” said Andy, climbing in. He started the truck; it exploded to life with a rattle and a chug. “No phone.”
    “Oh.” I reached into my purse, producing my BlackBerry. “You can use mine.”
    “Wouldn’t matter.” He looked over his shoulder then pulled out in a cloud of dust. “There’s no service out there.”
    “No service?” I looked at my BlackBerry, checking my texts. Two from Denny, one saying, YOU CHAINED YET? “My phone’s working.”
    Andy looked to me, smiling a bit insularly. “If you’re going to use it, use it quickly. It’s about to be useless.” Then he turned off Main to Forge Road.
    Almost instantly, clearings and houses gave way to piney woods and, within five hundred feet, macadam bumped into gravel. Not far after that, the road seemed to lose all sense of civilization as it turned into firmly-tamped sugar sand. Overhead the foliage grew denser from a clumping of tall trees, and I took in their clean scent, their soaring trunks rising out of a shallow stream of water.
    “Smells like my grandmother’s cedar chest,” I said, as we thumped over a short wooden bridge.
    “That’s because they’re cedar trees. And if her chest was made in Philadelphia, the wood probably came out of a bog like this.”
    As the cedar stand thickened, the afternoon dimmed. The bog was alive with gnats and dragonflies and a thousand whirling, zipping, clicking things. The air was cooler yet fragrantly lush. Soon the road narrowed and the woods opened up, pitch pines and scrub oaks replacing the tall cedars. The sparse undergrowth became a mix of bushes and ferns, laurel clumping near the edges. Even though the Pine Barrens had always loomed on Philadelphia’s periphery, I had never taken them for much more than a green filter on the way to the Jersey Shore. Although, once I had done a story on naturalist Howard P. Boyd, author of the definitive A Field Guide to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey (tucked into my suitcase, of course), and de facto dean of Pine Barrens ecology. The night before I had crammed like I hadn’t done since my college finals. But it was one thing seeing the forest from the pages of a book or as one zips down Route 72 at 65 mph. It was quite another bouncing inside it at no more than twenty per.
    I stuck my hand out the window and let it ride the current, near enough to the trees to flutter a pine swag, when we passed four crumbling chimney stacks rising out of a clearing.
    “That used to be a tavern,” he said, pointing toward it. “My family ran it when