Beckett's Convenient Bride. Dixie Browning

was a clear case of arrested development.

      But the man had known her full name. That had brought her up short, and before she could come to her senses curiosity had outweighed fear, and now she was stuck with him.

      Fortunately, he was out like a light, as she simply wasn’t up to the job of dragging him out and dumping him beside the road.

      Raking her hair from her forehead, she thrust her car keys in her pocket and hurried down the path, wondering if she’d left enough room for Ladybug. Without thinking, she’d parked the Yukon in the place she usually parked her own car. Second thoughts, and third ones, dogged her steps as she hurried along the road. How could she have walked out and left a strange man asleep in her house at a time like this?

      Even under normal circumstances Kit never invited men to sleep in her house. Sleeping over implied involvement, and Kit had a whole series of rules concerning getting involved with a man, starting with No Way and ending with Just Say No.

      Growing up in a family that was everything proper on the outside and totally dysfunctional behind closed doors had left scars that she was still trying to heal—or if not to heal, at least to hide.

      In other words, she mocked silently, you’re a chip off the old block.

      Early on, it hadn’t been quite so evident that once her father left for his office, the whole house seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. Back then, her mother would wait until just before dinner to take the first drink. During the day they would go places, just the two of them. Movies, museums, shopping…to the zoo. On rainy days they might play Fish or cut paper dolls from old fashion magazines. She’d loved that, making up stories about each one.

      For Kit’s eighth birthday her mother had given her a bride doll. In later years Kit always connected the doll in her mind with a large, gold-framed wedding picture that had hung in her mother’s sitting room. The bride in the picture wore a full-skirted lace gown and pearl-seeded veil, her eyes aglow in a classically beautiful face. Standing beside her, but not touching her stood the groom, Christopher Dixon, looking handsome and chillingly un-involved. That was before her mother’s drinking spiraled out of control.

      Oh, they’d been a pair, all right. According to her grandfather, Betty Chandler had set out to trap herself a rich husband, and in a weak moment, the judge’s only son had allowed himself to be caught.

      So far as Kit knew, her father had never had a weak moment in his entire life. If the judge was known as Cast Iron, then her father, a junior partner in a prestigious law firm at the time of his death, could surely have been called Stainless Steel.