A Match for Celia Read online

  Love. The simple endearment made her shiver. “No,” she murmured dreamily. “It hasn’t been average and traditional.”

  His lips moved against hers. “I think we have quite a few adventures still in store for us.”

  She pulled him closer, her pulse already racing in anticipation. “Oddly enough—I feel the same way,” she murmured just before Reed covered her mouth with his.

  Epilogue

  Frances Carson’s doorbell chimed at the same time her telephone began to ring early Saturday evening. She rushed to the door and threw it open. “Come on in, Lila. I have to answer the phone.”

  She dashed into the kitchen just as her friend came into the living room. They were on their way to a choir special at their church, and Frances didn’t want to be late, but she could never leave the telephone ringing unanswered. “Hello?”

  Several minutes later, Frances rejoined her friend in the other room, the telephone call over.

  Lila was still standing, her purse and gloves in her hands, her posture impatient. “We really must be going, Frances, or we’ll never get a decent seat. You know how I hate to be late.”

  Her fussing broke off suddenly as she searched her longtime friend’s face. “Frances, what is it? Is something wrong? You look…”

  “Stunned?” Frances supplied with a little laugh. “Flabbergasted?”

  “Well—yes,” Lila admitted, relaxing a bit as she realized that Frances wasn’t terribly upset. “Who was that on the phone?”

  “That was Celia. Lila, you’ll never believe this—but she’s gotten married!”

  “Married?” Lila repeated with a gasp. “Celia’s gotten married?”

  Frances nodded her head in shared astonishment. “Yes. It’s so hard to take in…. I suppose the phone will be ringing off the hook shortly when the others in the family find out.”

  “Let me get this straight. Your youngest granddaughter has actually married that man who’s always in the gossip magazines? That jet-setting Damien Alexander everyone’s been so worried about is actually going to settle down and start a family?”

  Frances laughed again. “She didn’t marry Damien Alexander. She’s married a man named Reed Hollander—a man she’s known less than two weeks. And she sounded deliriously happy about it. She promised me I’m going to love him.”

  Lila’s knees seemed to fold beneath her. She sat heavily on Frances’s sofa. “Oh, my. What an impulsive, reckless thing for her to have done.”

  “Yes.” Frances looked at Celia’s photograph and smiled mistily. “It’s exactly what Celia was hoping to find.”

  “I hope she hasn’t made a terrible mistake,” Lila, always the worrier, fretted.

  “So do I. But something tells me she hasn’t,” Frances, the eternal optimist, replied.

  Now, she thought, turning her attention to another photograph on her old piano, if only her dear, stuffy grandson Adam would find someone who could make him do something so romantic and daring….

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-5588-7

  A MATCH FOR CELIA

  Copyright © 1995 by Gina Wilkins

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