Wedding Vows: With This Ring: Rescued in a Wedding Dress / Bridesmaid Says, 'I Do!' / The Doctor's Surprise Bride

But the fact she was stuck in it, the zipper stubborn, her hair wound painfully around the pearls, represented more the reality: relationships of the romantic variety were sticky, complicated, entrapping.

Besides, a man didn’t come from the place Houston Whitford had come from and believe in fairy tales. He believed in his own strength, his own ability to survive. He saw the cynicism with which he had regarded that dress as a gift.

In fact, the unexpected appearance of one of the Second Chances employees in full wedding regalia only confirmed what several weeks of research had already told him.

Second Chances reminded Houston, painfully, of an old-style family operated bookstore. Everyone was drawn to the warmth of it, it was always crowded and full of laughter and discussion, but when it came time to actually buy a book it could not compete with the online giants, streamlined, efficient, economical. Just how Houston liked his businesses, running like well-oiled machines. No brides, no ancient, adorable little old ladies at the helm.

He fought an urge to press the scar over the old break on the bridge of his nose. It ached unbearably lately. Had it ached ever since, in a rare moment of weakness, he had agreed to help out here? This wasn’t his kind of job. He dealt in reality, in cold, hard fact. Where did a poorly run charity, with brides in the hallways and octogenarians behind the desks, fit into his world?

“And that was our Molly,” Miss Viv said brightly. “Isn’t she lovely?”

“Lovely,” Houston managed. He recalled part two of his mission here.

Miss Viv had confessed to him she was thinking of retiring. She loved Molly and considered her her natural successor. But she was a little worried. She wanted his opinion on whether Molly was too soft-hearted for the job.

“Is she getting ready for her wedding?” On the basis of their very brief encounter, Molly Michaels seemed the kind of woman that a man who was not cynical and jaded like him—a man who believed in fairy tales, love ever after, family—would snatch up.

He didn’t even like the direction of those thoughts. The wedding dress should only be viewed in the context of the job he had to do here. What was Miss Michaels doing getting ready for her wedding at work? How did that reflect on a future for her in management?

The job he hadn’t wanted was getting less attractive by the second. A demand of complete professionalism was high on his list of fixes for the ailing companies he put back on the track to success.

“She’s not getting ready for her wedding,” Miss Viv said with a sympathetic sigh. “The exact opposite, I’m afraid. Her engagement broke off before they even set a date. A blessing, though the poor child did not see it that way at the time. She’s not been herself since it happened.”

At this point, with anyone else, he would make it clear, right now, he didn’t want to know a single thing about Molly Michaels’s personal life. But this job was different than any he’d ever taken on before. And this was Miss Viv.

Everybody was a poor child to her. His need to analyze, to have answers to puzzles, surprised him by not filing this poor child information under strictly personal, none of his business, nothing to do with the job at hand. Instead, he allowed the question to form in his mind. If a man believed in the fairy tale enough to ask someone like Molly Michaels to be his wife, why would he then be fool enough to let her get away?

Because the truth was lovely was an unfortunate understatement, and would have been even before he had made the mistake of making the bridal vision somehow real by touching the heated silk of Molly’s skin, the coiled copper of her hair.

Molly’s eyes, the set of her sensuous mouth and the corkscrewing hair, not to mention the curves of a slender figure, had not really said lovely to him. Despite the fairy tale of the dress the word that had come to mind first was sexy.

Was that what had made him get up from his chair? Not really to rescue her from her obvious discomfort, but to see what was true about her? Sexy? Or innocent?

He was no Boy Scout, after all, not given to good deeds, which was another reason he should not be here at Second Chances.

Still, was his need to know that about Molly Michaels personal or professional? He had a feeling at Second Chances those lines had always been allowed to blur. Note to self, he thought wryly, no more rescuing of damsels in distress.

Though, really that was why he was here, even if Miss Viv was obviously way too old to qualify as a damsel.

Houston Whitford was CEO of Precision Solutions, a company that specialized in rescuing ailing businesses, generally large corporations, from the brink of disaster. His position used all of his strengths, amongst which he counted a formidable ability to not be swayed be emotion.

He was driven, ambitious and on occasion, unapologetically ruthless, and he could see that was a terrible fit with Second Chances. He didn’t really even like charities, cynically feeling that for one person to receive the charity of another was usually as humiliating for the person in need as it was satisfying for the one who could give.

But the woman who sat in front of him was a reminder that no man had himself alone to thank for his circumstances.

Houston Whitford was here, at Second Chances, because he owed a debt.

And he was here for the same reason he suspected most men blamed when they found themselves in untenable situations.

His mother, Beebee, had suggested he help out. So, it had already been personal, some line blurred, even before the bride had showed up.

Beebee was Houston’s foster mother, but it was a distinction he rarely made. She had been there when his real mother—as always—had not. Beebee had been the first person he had ever felt genuinely cared about him and what happened to him. He owed his life as it was to her charity, and he knew it.

Miss Viv was Beebee’s oldest friend, part of that remarkable group of women who had circled around a tough boy from a terrible neighborhood and seen something in him—believed in something in him—that no one had ever seen or believed in before.

You didn’t say sorry, too busy in the face of that kind of a debt.

It had started a month ago, when he’d hosted a surprise birthday celebration for Beebee. The catered high tea had been held at his newly acquired “Gold Coast” condominium with its coveted Fifth Avenue address, facing Central Park.

Beebee and “the girls” had been all sparkle then, oohing over the white-gloved doorman, the luxury of the lobby, the elevators, the hallways. Inside the sleek interior of his eleven-million-dollar apartment, no detail had gone unremarked, from tiger wood hardwood to walnut moldings to the spectacular views.

But as the party had progressed, Miss Viv had brought up Second Chances, the charity she headed, and that all “the girls” supported. She confessed it was having troubles, financial and otherwise, that baffled her.

“Oh, Houston will help, won’t you, dear?” his foster mom had said.

And all eyes had been on him, and in a blink he wasn’t a successful entrepreneur who had proven himself over and over again, but that young ruffian, poor child, rescued from mean streets and a meaner life, desperately trying to live up to their expectation that he was really a good person under that tough exterior.

But after that initial weakness that had made him say yes, he’d laid down the law. If they wanted his help, they would have to accept the fact he was doing it his way: no interfering from them, no bringing him home-baked goodies to try to sway him into keeping things the very same way that had gotten the charity into trouble in the first place and especially no references to his past.

Of course, they hadn’t understood that.

“But why ever not? We’re all so proud of you, Houston!”

But Beebee and her friends weren’t just proud of him because of who he was now. No, they were the ones who held in their memories that measuring stick of who he had once been…a troubled fourteen-year-old kid from the tenements of Clinton, a neighborhood that had once been called Hell’s Kitchen.

They saw it as something to be admired that he had overcome his circumstances—his father being sent to prison, his mother abandoning him—but he just saw it as something left behind him.

Beebee and Miss Viv dispensed charity as easily as they breathed, but as well-meaning as they were, they had no idea how shaming that part of his life, when he had been so needy and so vulnerable, was to him. He did not excuse himself because he had only been fourteen.

He still felt, sometimes, that he was their poor child, an object of pity that they had rescued and nursed back to wellness like a near-drowned kitten.

Was he insecure about his past? No, he didn’t think so. But it was over and it was done. He’d always had an ability to place his life in neat compartments; his need for order did not allow for overlapping.

But suddenly, he thought of that letter that had arrived at his home last week, a cheap envelope and a prison postmark lying on a solid mahogany desk surely a sign that a man could not always keep his worlds from overlapping.

Houston had told no one about the arrival of that letter, not even the only other person who knew his complete history, Beebee.

Was that part of why he was sending her away with Miss Viv? Not just because he knew they could probably not resist sharing the titillating details of his past with anyone who would listen, including all the employees here at Second Chances, but because he didn’t want to talk to Beebee about that letter? The thought of that letter, plus being here at Second Chances, made him feel what Houston Whitford hated feeling the most: vulnerable, as if that most precious of commodities, control, was slipping away from him.

And there was something about this place—the nature of charity, Miss Viv and his history, Molly, sweetly sensual in virginal white—that made him feel, not as if his guard was being let down, but that his bastions were being stormed.

He was a proud man. That pride had carried him through times when all else had failed. He didn’t want Miss Viv’s personal information about him undermining his authority to rescue her charity, changing the way people he had to deal with looked at him.

And when people found out his story, it did change the way they looked at him.

He could tell, for instance, Molly Michaels would fall solidly in the soft-hearted category. She’d love an opportunity to treat him like a kitten who had nearly drowned! And he wasn’t having it.

“Let’s discuss Molly Michaels for a minute,” he said carefully. “I’d like to have a little talk with her about—”