Beckett's Convenient Bride by Dixie Browning Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Three days after her parents’ funeral—they’d died in a plane crash when she was eighteen—she had started making plans to move. They had lived only a few miles from the elder Dixons’ spacious white brick house on the Chesapeake Bay. Her grandparents were more than capable of dealing with the estate. Not that they would have welcomed her input even if she’d dared offer it.
    Poor Grandmother—the judge insisted on the formal titles—had been crushed by the death of her only child, but under her husband’s cold, disapproving eye she had quickly rallied. By the day of the funeral she’d been her old self to all outward appearances, which was all thatmattered to the Dixons. Cool, polite and properly withdrawn.
    The next day her grandfather had sent for Kit to discuss her father’s will. Instead of obeying the summons, she had gone back upstairs to her room and started packing, boxing up her collection of books, her paints, her clothes and her mother’s wedding photograph. Then she’d locked the front door and headed south with one hundred and thirty-seven dollars and no prospects.
    And she’d done just fine. Missed a few meals along the way and spent more than a few nights in her car, but she’d learned quickly and been lucky. Before her grandfather could enlist every law enforcement officer in the Commonwealth of Virginia to track her down, she’d called to let them know she was all right. She hadn’t told them where she was, but since then she’d continued to call and occasionally drop in for a brief visit.
    She honestly didn’t know why she bothered, since all they did was criticize and try to coerce her into returning to the fold. Her grandmother’s gentle chiding was as bad as her grandfather’s harsh disapproval. According to the judge, Kit was just like her mother—weak, flighty and immoral. Just look at the way she dressed, for one thing—which, of course, had made her dress all the more outrageously. And working as a waitress? No member of his family had ever worked in a menial position.
    She was a darned good waitress. She’d like to see him try and keep up with orders and unruly patrons without losing his cool on a busy night at the height of the tourist season.
    Still, they were all the family she had. Deep down, she probably loved them. At least, she couldn’t bring herself to cut them off completely. One of these days they might even need her, and if that time ever came she would bethere for them. But she would never go back and allow them to treat her the way they had treated her mother.
    Thinking always made Kit walk faster. She was halfway along Landing Road when she glanced up to see someone trying to open her car door.
    Her steps faltered. Had she locked it?
    Of course she’d locked it—although as a rule she didn’t bother. Gil’s Point was hardly a haven for car thieves.
    â€œHey, you!” she shouted.
    The man glanced over his shoulder. Several men down at the boat dock looked up. Gil’s Point was that kind of place—no more