The Bride Wore Blue Jeans

Trouble was, Kevin mused, moving into the kitchen to prepare a lunch he had no desire to eat, he had neither wanted the high life, nor known what to do with it should he ever wind up stumbling across it.

What he wanted was the busy life. The life that barely gave him enough time to draw two breaths together in succession.

Kevin stared into the refrigerator. It was nearly empty. He’d forgotten to go grocery shopping. Again. Lily used to take care of that for him because he was always too busy to do it himself.

Too busy.

That’s the way it had been ever since he’d turned seventeen and, through some creative doctoring of his birth certificate, had gotten himself placed in charge of his orphaned brother and sisters. Overnight he’d become both mother and father to three kids without the comforting benefit of having a spouse or ever having procreated.

And now, he thought, he was experiencing the empty-nest syndrome under the same set of circumstances.

Big time.

That was probably why, in a moment of weakness—because Nathan and Joe had talked him into thinking that perhaps a huge change might shake him out of his doldrums—he’d sold his taxicab service. The very same service that had seen his fledgling family through the hard times. The same service that had allowed him to put food on the table and take out a loan so that Jimmy could go to medical school and graduate as something more than a pauper with an incredible debt to repay.

It was Kevin who had shouldered the debt. And he who’d been so damn proud of his brother at graduation.

In its time, the taxicab service had also allowed him to put Alison, the baby of the family, through nursing school and to set Lily up in her very first restaurant when they’d all decided that she had an incredible gift for creating meals but no capacity for taking orders.

And where had all that loan-incurring finally gotten him?

Alone, that’s where.

Alone while the rest of them, the three people who mattered most in his life, had gone off, one by one, to live in Alaska, in some godforsaken place aptly labeled Hades.

Hell.

Wandering back into the living room, Kevin dropped down into the sofa and stared blankly at a woman trying vainly to escape a horde of rampaging twelve-foot spiders. Midday programs were hellish, too.

That was where he felt he was right now. In hell. And he’d discovered something these past few weeks. It wasn’t fire and brimstone that created a hell, it was bare-bones loneliness. Loneliness comprised of slick, glasslike walls that sent him sliding back to the ground no matter how quickly he tried to scale them.

He knew he should be proud of his siblings and the selflessness they’d exhibited to varying degrees. Alison had gone first, because Hades needed a nurse and she needed to get certified as a nurse-practitioner by putting time in a place like that.

Only problem was, she’d put in her heart as well and so had remained.

When Jimmy had gone to visit her, he’d lost his heart as well. Not to the region, but to April Yearling, the granddaughter of Hades’s postmistress. Hades and the surrounding region badly needed another doctor and Jimmy had found his true calling.

Lily’s broken engagement had brought her to the same place to recover, Alaska being the only place that could withstand the heat of her anger without frying to a crisp. Intending to stay only two weeks, Lily found solace for her wounded pride and chipped heart with Hades sheriff, Max Yearling, who just happened to be April’s brother.

It was as if the Fates were conspiring to bring his family to a place that spent six months of every year in a deep freeze, cut off from civilization except by air travel.

Kevin had thought—hoped—that Alaska might be a passing phase with Lily. Lily had always been the mercurial one, the one who never invested her emotions for fear of being hurt. But this time, she apparently was sticking it out, and the last time he’d spoken to her, she’d said something about bringing real food to the residents of Hades and had her eye on opening a restaurant there. He knew the signs by now. Lily, like Alison and Jimmy before her, was settling in for good.

Unable to watch the giant spiders destroy yet another campsite and assorted campers, Kevin flipped the channel. The afternoon news looked no less disconcerting. He dropped the remote on the table, giving up.

The restlessness refused to abate.

It was this restlessness that had made him so susceptible to Nathan and Joe’s suggestion about selling the cab service. He’d done it on a lark, put the business up for sale. His heart hadn’t really been in it. And then that offer had come in. The one he couldn’t refuse without submitting himself to a sanity hearing because it was so incredibly lucrative.

So here he was, a man of leisure who knew absolutely nothing about taking it easy except what he’d learned lately, which was that he hated it. That he wasn’t cut out for it in any manner, shape or form.

Which was why he’d been searching through the Seattle classifieds this Sunday morning, looking at the section that listed businesses for sale and trying to figure out what to do with himself other than making the electric company rich by pumping electricity through every room of the empty house. The house where he and his brother and sisters had grown up in.

“What you need, boy, is a fine-looking woman to take your mind off everything.” That had been Nathan’s solution, delivered sagely over a mug of ale.

Fine-looking women were Nathan’s solution to everything, up to and including global warming and the threat of an alien invasion. However, that wasn’t his solution, Kevin thought. Not even remotely.

He got up and shut off the television set and picked up the classifieds again. Maybe there was something he’d missed the first time.

Looks had never meant anything to him. Heart did. Heart and soul and patience. But all the women he’d known possessing those qualities had been taken long before now.

Besides, there wasn’t much chance of a woman like that showing up at his door, and that would be the only way he’d run into one. He didn’t believe in any of the conventional ways of “hooking up” with members of the fairer sex. That had never been his way. And now that he no longer occasionally drove a cab, there was absolutely no chance of his meeting anyone.

Kevin paused, trying to remember the last time he’d actually gone out on a date. Nothing came to him.

But dating, or finding a lifelong partner wasn’t why he was looking to put his newfound fortune into another business. He just wanted to be doing something. Something productive.

Anything productive.

He’d been out of the taxicab business for exactly five days and was going stir-crazy.

The phone rang and he grabbed the receiver like a drowning man grabbing at a twig floating by him in the river.

If it was a telemarketer on the other end, he thought, this was their lucky day. He was buying, as long as buying meant he could hear the sound of another person’s voice responding to his own.

“Hello?”

“Kev?”

Kevin could feel himself lighting up inside like a Christmas tree the instant he heard his sister’s voice on the other end of the line.

“Lily, how are you?” He bit back the desire to ask the next question that loomed in his mind in twenty-four-foot neon letters: Are you coming home? He already knew the answer to that. Asking wasn’t going to change it.

“I’m terrific, Kev. Better than terrific, I’m spectacular.”

He didn’t have to see her to know that she was positively glowing. So much for her throwing in the towel and deciding to move back to Seattle.

There was something else in her voice he recognized as well. “You’re getting married, aren’t you?”

There was a slight pause on the other end of the line. “God, but you’re good. How did you—?”

A small laugh escaped him. “I’ve had this conversation before. Twice,” he reminded her. “When Alison called to say she was marrying Luc and when Jimmy called to say he was staying on as a doctor in Hades and, oh, by the way, yes, he was getting married.”

If Jimmy, a guy known to his friends as the eternal happy bachelor could succumb to the charms of a homegrown native, Kevin had known in his heart that Lily wasn’t far behind. Especially when she’d called before to give him a detailed description of Max Yearling right down to his worn, size-ten boots. It was only a matter of waiting for the shoe to finally drop, that’s all.

Kevin knew he was happy for her, even as he was sad for himself. He did his best to sound cheerful. “So the sheriff makes you happy, does he?”

Lily sighed, contentment of a caliber he didn’t ever recall hearing before in her voice. “The way you wouldn’t believe.”